In Between

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. The event was a timestamp that indicated life, continuous existence albeit in an earthly purgatory, stuck in between, monitored by lazily beeping machines and indifferent nurses and doctors – people who got to go home at night, people who got to experience humanity at their leisure, people who felt, but, she reminded herself, people who didn’t get to see the purple clouds.

They moved swiftly but without a distinct pattern, the sky a stoic canvas for whatever artistry the clouds felt like delivering that night. Sometimes it felt aggressive, confrontational almost, the way they darted and dove, violent changes in direction and speed, an air of storminess. Other nights it was more peaceful, luring motions that calmed and satisfied, and she would wish she could be among them, riding their sweeping movements, feeling the wind, the precipitation, the air pressure. Feeling something.

She knew there would come a day where the clouds didn’t come – when the pale purple puffs morphed into a wispy memory, a memory that drifted further away as the days passed, eventually wandering into the bliss of forgetfulness, along with everything else she didn’t remember. She couldn’t think of any examples.

She spent her days longing for the clouds and sometimes it felt they came on time, but sometimes she thought they were early, or late, but it was always midnight when they came.

She thought of everything happening in the construct of time as she knew it, but where she was, time, as defined by humanity, didn’t exist – it was something else entirely, time, something determined by the clouds and when they appeared, how they behaved, how they made her feel – It was no longer something that could be measured, but she measured it anyway by deciding it was midnight when the clouds appeared.

She found it funny, her reliance on a natural event to dictate time, akin to her most ancient ancestors, creating a phenomenon out of nature yet nonexistent in nature, a construct to ease the pain of each day’s existence, something to help look forward and distract from present pain. Now might be bad, but later won’t. But she didn’t feel anything, so how did that work?

She wondered why she so desired to see the clouds, since she knew they weren’t real, since she knew she wasn’t really awake when they showed, since she knew they kept her family waiting in an earthly purgatory.

Some days she felt closer to reality, and other days she felt closer to something else. Those were the days where the clouds were aggressive and stormy, so she didn’t like it. She didn’t know for sure what that something else was, but she had a guess, and really, she did know.

She knew there would come a day where the clouds didn’t come. But they might not fade into a memory. They might just not show. And that would be it. Then there definitely wouldn’t be any time. That’s why she so desired to see the clouds. She didn’t have to wonder but she did to keep herself sane.

When she awoke they asked her what it was like and she wanted to tell them all about the purple clouds coming out to dance with the blushing sky every night at midnight but she couldn’t because they were her purple clouds, her memory, her symbol of persistence in an earthly purgatory – they wouldn’t understand, she thought, and she told them that she didn’t remember anything. She wondered how long she’d remember the purple clouds. She felt sick.