I was at my grandmother's house, sleeping on the couch. I made this trick up as a child to get out of awkward conversation with family members. This way, you can stay quiet, and in your own mind while to everyone else comments on how you're just "so adorable" or as you get older, "aw, the poor thing, she works too hard". So anyway, I was sleeping when I woke to a terrible pain on the side of my head. From my temple down to my jaw. Almost like the first sleep after a coke binge, like I had gnawed a fucking vortex into my own cheek. I went to the bathroom to see what was going on and my face was inflamed, that might be putting it lightly, the entire left half of my face looked like it had been filled with gelatin. For a couple minutes, I shook my head hard - thinking maybe I'm still asleep, this is a dream. I whipped my head around for one last time to the right and leaned into the mirror, hoping I'd see my average face staring back, but instead it was Goonies's Sloth, if the Goonies had been a horror flick. I had ribbons (cliche, I know) but there's no better way to describe it, of blood across my face. Thin, perfectly drawn, red. After inspecting for quit sometime I realized the red was coming from my left ear. I rolled my head over to a parallel position with the ground and, like honey, the blood started to move. I could hear it, almost taste it, as it made its way from inside me, to the tiny slit, inch onto my earlobe and fall to the floor. It didn't SPLAT, like you might think, it just laid down, quietly. Obviously, the beauty of this didn't hit me till later, and I was freaking the fuck out. I run out into the living room and gather my family members who seems to think that I'm making the whole thing up, I'm just tired, I'm pulling a prank on them, or that I'm "overly emotional and creative". What the fuck ever, I HAVE BLOOD POURING OUT OF MY FUCKING EAR AND MY FACE IS HUGE. My mom had gone to the store to get a few items, so I tried calling her, which was very difficult because I had to lean my head to the right, so not to get blood everywhere, but it just pooled up in my left ear pocket and spilled over the side, anyway. No answer. No answer. No answer. Mom, mom, mom, PLEASE PICK UP, PLEASE PICK UP, I'm dying, I'm dying. I'm fucking dying.
--- This is when I wake up in real life covered in sweat, feeling my face and crying. I fall back asleep.
Four days pass. I'm bleeding in the desert. I'm bleeding in the mall. I'm bleeding on my mom's front stoop. I'm bleeding at the convenience store. I'm walking to the hospital, alone, and bleeding, and no one will listen to me. I'm exhausted and about to give up. I knew I'd die alone, screaming. I wake up in Fairfax. A place I know well. My face is fine. My pillow is absent of blood. And there's a man sitting on the bed across from me. Suited, cold, odorless. I ask him, why I'm there? Did I walk there instead of the real hospital (that's embarrassing)? What did I do?
He explains to me that I had been there for six days. There was no desert. No phone call. No blood.
-- I wake up again.