Chapter 2: The Hospital

After the doctor withdrew himself from my room, I was left with disorganized thoughts and a lot of information I wasn't sure how to process; the silence in the room was palpable. Neither of us knew what to say to each other; finally, Mr. Daxon rose from his seat and embraced me, a gesture that caught me off guard.

I could see the tears coming down his cheeks and warming up the shoulders of my hospital gown as he hugged me tighter with every dripping tear. He took a deep breath in, a failed attempt at calming himself. He then said to me,

"We will solve this together."

By this point, I had started to want some answers. The initial frustration and fears of waking up disoriented had started to wear off, and they had been replaced with anger and a drive to find answers. I willed up the courage and asked the first question that came to mind.

"What happened to me?"

The woman was the first one to look at me; she had a guilty look on her face, the kind of look that a kid would give their parents when they knew they had done something terrible but were afraid of admitting it. She took a deep, long breath and clenched her fists against her legs. She nodded at Mr Daxon and then proceeded to address me.

"We don't know; we have been trying to figure it out, but there wasn't much to go off from," she said with a solemn tone in her voice.

"What do you mean you DON'T KNOW?" I asked angrily, "Where did you find me? How did I end up here?"

The man put a comforting hand on the woman's shoulders.

"We found you covered in blood, unresponsive – We didn't know how much it was yours or if there was someone else's blood involved; we thought we lost you." the man said firmly as if he was trying his best to maintain a controlled environment.

"No, We didn't think it Will, WE DID lose you."

At this point, I was in shock. There were more questions than answers than I had expected, and it left me thinking about how much of me I wanted to know about and if there was a small part of me that perhaps felt relieved to have forgotten what had gotten me here.

"How long?" I asked

"How long what?"

"How long have I been out?"

"I don't think we want to put that kind of pressure on you — The woman said as she dug herself deeper into the chair — After all you just woke up"

"No, I need to know."

"a century ago"

"A century ago? how is that even possible?" This didn't make any sense, how can I be in a comma for this long?

"You have been out for a century. This is a lot to explain, but we can show you and explain it better once you are released. This is more of a show and tell."

and that was that any further questions about the subject fell on deaf ears.

The days passed as my family and I got more comfortable. There wasn't much to do in the hospital while I recovered besides talking to each other and re-discovering our relationship. My father, William, told me about how his work as a historian kept him busy. His job as a preservationist gave him a flexible schedule to come and go to the hospital and travel around the world and see some of the most valuable and magnificent pieces of history. According to him, I was following his path in a similar way; I hunted down ancient artifacts believed to have belonged to the gods themselves. My mother, Nisha, is an expert linguist. She was in charge of translating much of my father's and I's work while starting the preservation stages.

The more I heard about our lives, although we lived separately, the more I wanted to remember them, remember them, remember our adventures. Our jobs somehow intertwined together even if grew apart. We grew together through our professions.

Dr. Orion kept taps on me and visited consistently. It had been at least seven days since the day that I had woken up. After relentless exams and scans, I could finally leave with my family. The relief on everyone's faces when he came in to let us know that he thought I had recuperated my strength, was able to get my belongings, and was slowly returning to what my life was, had me both excited and worried. I was divided for one part: I would finally be able to look outside the hospital walls; for the other part, I was deeply worried about the question of how much of my old life I would be able to return to without a memory of it and how my work would be affected by it.