The Hour I Never Had

"Count backwards from ten."

The IV needle sits cold in my arm. I stare at ceiling tiles and fluorescent light.

"Ten." I think about my coffee this morning, the book on my nightstand, whether my cat will notice I'm gone.

"Nine." I open my mouth to say eight, but…

"How are you feeling?"

I blink at different ceiling tiles in a different room. My mouth tastes like aluminum foil.

"What time is it?"

"About an hour later than when you went under."

An hour. Sixty minutes that belonged to my body but not to me. I touched nothing, felt nothing, dreamed nothing. For one hour, I practiced being dead.

"Did I...exist?" I ask.

She checks her clipboard. "You did great."

But that doesn't answer what I meant. Somewhere in this hospital is an hour of my life that happened without me. My heart beat, my lungs breathed, my cells divided. The machines kept score while I was nowhere.

I sit up slowly, my body feeling unfamiliar. The clock ticks forward, indifferent to my crisis. Time moved on whether I was conscious enough to catch the ride or not.

They gave me twilight sleep and kept my consciousness as collateral. I got my body back, but that hour belongs to the void now.

The strangest part isn't that I lost time: it's that time didn't lose me. My life continued in my absence, maintained by strangers while I was gone from my own existence.

Ten, nine, then nothing. Somewhere between those numbers, I learned that being alive and being conscious aren't the same thing.

I just don't remember learning it.