The night before last, as I laid there in a hospital bed, that was about as cozy as concrete, with a drip in my arm (it hurt to bend my arm because of this, so I was trying to fall asleep with my arm hanging off of the bed), the lights in my room kept flickering on and off. In the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, the lights had been flickering on and off, something the paramedics found highly unusual and when we stopped, the doors wouldn’t open (this was convenient to me as I at that moment, I didn’t particularly want to be wheeled into A&E). Anyway when the lights stopped flickering in my room, this green and ghoulish face grinned at me from inside an overhead light that had been shut off. This face sometimes turned right so I could study its profile. This (understandably) made it somewhat harder to sleep.
After I was discharged the next morning and my dad and I were driving to McDonald’s to get some breakfast, I don’t know why, but I got thinking about this strange incident that happened when I was fifteen and away at boarding school. This was something that should have troubled me but it didn’t. It was during the first week I was there. I don’t remember the night but the day after, when I was talking to another student, I learnt something quite unusual. He was surprised to find out that I was a boarder because he said that the night before, there was a fire alarm and everyone was lined up outside (boys and girls), everyone except me. It goes without saying that he had not seen me there, and I certainly hadn’t recalled hearing any fire alarm! Nobody at the dorm even mentioned it, let alone woken me up during the fact. Besides that being unethical (if not outright dangerous), it is also unusual because these are the same people who, during my first night there woke me up in the middle of the night to have a shower (in the pitch black, when the power was out, no less)! They would certainly have never let me sleep through a fire alarm. It is also unusual that no one there, not even the students mentioned it. We’re talking about adults and students who a) cannot keep a secret (even when they probably should), and b) have so little to talk about that simply getting Chinese food for dinner was popular gossip for weeks on end! I had no privacy there; in fact I couldn’t even be in the dorm by myself, without a member of staff… so how could I just disappear with no recollection and nobody mentioning it? Where did I go and why did no one remember?