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I wake to a heartbeat that isn't mine.
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It was a distant drum at first, more felt than heard, like thunder far across water. The sound presses through me in waves, shaking the soft boundary that contains me. The only sensations I felt in the early days were pressure and warmth and the weightless drag of fluid around my limbs. I do not have names for any of it, not at the beginning. Sensation arrived before understanding, and I float in a soup of it, aware only that I am cradled inside something living, and that it carries me everywhere it goes.
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The drum goes on forever, every conscious moment of mine is encapsulated by that sound: ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. I realize I have another drum inside me, smaller, quicker, like a bird trying to match an ocean's pulse. My beat stutters when the larger one hurries. It calms when the larger one slows. The two sounds lean toward each other, meet in the middle, and I sway where I am.
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I don't know that I have a body until something jostles it. A shift. A press of an outside palm against the wall—my world dents and I roll a little. A cord draws tight at my middle and pulls me back. My hand—my hand, I realize, with the dim starburst shock of discovery—nudges the slick curve of my prison and is nudged in return. The boundary is firm but forgiving. I try again, a tentative push with a foot, I am not yet certain how to command. My body does not seem to listen to me. The world pushes back in the same steady measure, as if saying, yes, you are here, and so am I.
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Sound grows teeth. Before, everything was hum and throb. Now there are voices. One voice is quick, clipped, layers of concern tucked under a competent rhythm. Another voice is heavier, a little rough, as if it has been used too much and oiled too little. There are others, sometimes, bare whispers like dry leaves skimming past the door to my darkness. I do not understand the words. I catch the pauses. The breath between them. The reverence with which silence is kept after certain syllables.
Everything is muffled. Letters seem to melt on the way to me. I pretend I can hold them anyway. It feels like learning to balance on a moving floor. I keep listening, because listening makes the space inside my head brighter somehow, as if attention itself is a hand that can open shutters. Thoughts were a concept long forgotten as my lulled had tried hard to grasp whatever it could.
Sometimes the quick voice presses gently into the wall of my world. When that happens, a different warmth rolls through the boundary and around me. It is not the same as heat; I would not call it temperature, not precisely. It is a soft glow that hums when it passes, a subtle order laid over the chaos of blood and breath. It brushes me and retreats, brushes me and retreats, like a tide that knows its limits. When it is near, the large heartbeat steadies, and the small one inside my chest follows suit. I like the feeling without knowing why. I turn toward it when I can.
I turn, and as I turn, a word unhooks itself from a deep place and floats up like a bubble. The word is "remember."
I do not remember. Or I do, but the thoughts won't hold still. When I try to look at and feel them straight on, they shy away. The idea of a room, square, and bright. The idea of a window, the light hard and outside the glass. The idea of a desk. The idea of my hand, not tiny and floppy but long and clumsy and covered in ink. The memory fades moments later as I lose consciousness.
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I am rocked by steps that aren't mine. I am cradled by breath that isn't mine. Sometimes the big heart hammers fast, and the air outside grows cold; even through the separation, I can taste the metallic sting of fear. The fear is not mine, and yet it thuds against the wall like it is trying to be. The quick voice soothes. The rough voice says something that makes the quick voice go quiet. The warmth rolls back through me again—measured, not exactly kind, precisely where it means to go—and the fear smooths thin, like a wrinkle in the bed pressed away.
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Days pass. I know that only by the way the voices come and go. The rough one belongs to a shift. The quick one belongs to a shift. The rustling ones belong to the spaces in between. The light in here is constant and not made of light. I count time in the repetition of the warmth, in the ways it touches me and lets goes.
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Memory is a tide. It recedes so I can breathe the nothing that isn't air, then surges when I relax, trying to take me with it. I resist at first, because even the constant hum of the dark has become a cradle, and the past comes with edges. But it insists, and on one slow turn through water, it brings me texture: cheap cotton. A shirt, sweat-wrinkled and not mine. It had a logo once that flaked away in the wash. I see it hanging on the back of a chair near a window that looks down on a street lined with dirty bikes. This seems huge to me. Not the content—any stranger's shirt would do—but the fact that there is a shirt, a chair, a world with corners and gravity and dust motes dancing in a slat of sun. I know that place is behind me, and I know I lost it. The knowledge is cool and sharp. I tuck it against my chest like a stone.
When the quick voice returns, I can track its rising and falling. It says a word that sounds like "breath." It says another that sounds like "coils" or "cords," but used with a tenderness and gravity that makes me think it is not the same as the cord that feeds me. The word comes with the ordered warmth again. I turn toward it greedily. The warmth hums along something not quite physical that courses through the wall and around me and, when I am very careful, flows through me.
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Another splash of memory: a microwave door slamming; the soft reek of buttered noodles and the click of plastic cutlery spilling into a sink. Laughter. The wrongness of a chair that's a little shorter than it should be. A floor with a sticky spot someone swore they cleaned. That memory is a whole environment by itself, and so ordinary it makes me ache. It tells me I was young enough to be sloppy and old enough to be expected to hide it. It tells me I lived in a shared space and resented being both never alone and constantly lonely.
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Between one day and the next (days measured in the rhythm of the quick voice's return, the soft roll of ordered warmth), my eyelids twitch. The reaction is useless—no light to see, and even if there were, they do not open yet—but the twitch feels like a flag: neuron to muscle, message received. I curl my hand and uncurl it. I am pleased like a child at finally moving water and making room for my twitch. Then the quick voice says a sound that is directed at me, as the wall compresses.
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Memory comes back with a different flavor: old electronics. A lecture hall filled with the hum of projectors, breath going in human waves, the fidgeting noises of students who do not want to be where they are. A slide with bullet points. Words like "midterm," "weighted," "lab." We were bored. I was bored. The boredom felt like a sickness; it filled my throat when I tried to swallow and tasted like pennies. But there was also a peace in that moment. No one in that room was measuring me for anything more than how fast I could learn to regurgitate structure. My grade was my horizon, small and square. I was a college student. Not brilliant. Not failing. The kind of person whose ambitions slide off the table's edge and disappear under the fridge when you aren't watching.
There were friends, though the word is too generous. There were people I watched movies with while we argued about whether popcorn was a meal. A boy named Eli, who smelled like fresh laundry and taught me to microwave eggs without the yolk exploding, was a fun memory nonetheless. A girl named Mina who hacked her hair off over the sink with kitchen scissors and pretended she didn't care, and later cried because the back looked like torn grass. I remember being nineteen and feeling like every emotion was a mirror, and everything I put into the world bounced back on me, carrying someone else's fingerprints. It should comfort me that those faces come, soft and inevitable. It doesn't. It feels like looking at fish behind glass. They are complete in their little tank, and I am outside, and deep down, I know I will never touch the water again.
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I do not know how I died. The thought arrives and sits with calm, awful weight. The memories that follow it are practical: the campus bus at night, the mean strobe of a streetlamp with a faulty bulb, the way my phone felt like a shield in my palm just because I was holding it. I remember waking up too late because I had stayed up too long writing a paper that was not about anything except how words look when they stand next to each other. I remember being hungry and calling it "fasting" as if that made it a noble choice, an excuse borrowed from an Indian friend. But there is no last day, no last breath. Perhaps this is a mercy. Or perhaps the dark here simply has too many hands to let me reach back with mine.
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I turn again, an awkward tumble that makes the small heart thrash in my chest. The world keeps me from hurting myself against it. The cord at my middle tugs. Sometimes I trip on my own breath—practice breaths the body does without needing air, my chest muscles now developed, moving entirely on muscle memory. The action makes shadows in my head. The shadows give language a place to sit. I catch more words now, though I can not understand them. I learn the rhythm of the quick voice's patience and the rough one's disdain. I know when they set their hands on the wall, even before I feel the pressure, simply by the sound of voices coming toward me.
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I discover the outline of a new sense. It begins as a mistake. I am listening to the warm hum that comes with the quick voice, letting the sound pour past the place inside me that takes comfort. I focus on the hum because I can control nothing else, yet it is one point of the day when I gain the most focus. The focus itself changes something. It tightens, like there is an aperture in my attention that narrows until the hum becomes a bunch of lines I can trace. It is not only sound. It is a current under the current, a river running beneath the blood-river. When it runs through my mother, it answers the rhythm of her heart. When the quick voice touches the wall, the hum surges along that under-river, and the river glows in ways beyond temperature.
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I follow it. At first, I only look. I am not sure what looking means without eyes, but that is what it feels like. I attend. The river-not-river outlines a pattern in the wall and around me that is more lattice than stream. I am the distant echo of a child tracing a woven basket with a fingertip. I cannot affect the weave. I feel it, and then the feeling recedes, like the dream you chase down a corridor and lose when the door opens and the room is wrong.
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If I had a mouth, I would laugh at myself, here in the dark, learning to be patient with skills I did not know what it was. But all I can do is wait until the quick voice returns to lay the hum across me again.
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Memory returns with the smell of rain on hot pavement. It coats everything. I am walking across campus holding a notebook over my head, and it is useless. The notebook turns to pulp and soaks my hair. I am laughing because it is absurd to pretend it's helping. A boy runs past in a poncho that whistles. My jeans cling to my legs, and I hate them. I already know I will have to sit in a lecture hall and peel them off when I get home. The laugh is mine, high and uncontrolled, and I hear it bounce off a glass wall and return sounding like a stranger. I was very much alive. The fact of that live-ness hurts now in a way I do not have a word for. It is like pressing a bruise for proof.
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Sleep happens, but I am not certain when. It is less a leaving than a letting go. I drift to the far side of the hum, and time folds in on itself like cloth. I return when the cloth is shaken out, when the rumble changes.
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Memory turns to the color of computer light at two in the morning. My dorm room was always messier at night, as if entropy had a circadian rhythm. A single cup of instant coffee sat on top of a stack of articles I had pretended to read and only highlighted for the comfort of holding a pen. My roommate snored. I learned that it was possible to feel alone with another person sleeping six feet away. It is a skill no one should need... I used it often.
I think of my mother now, here, and we are as close as two people can be without being the same, and I am still alone. The loneliness is not a complaint. It is a condition like gravity. I feel it moving in both lives and understand that something in me was shaped for it, and something in me will be shaped by it again.
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Memory turns over and gives me a voicemail from my mother in the other life. Not this mother, not the ocean I float inside now, but a voice I haven't thought about because I did not want to open that door. In the voice mail, she says my name with a tiredness that made me want to ask if she slept at all without her child. She asks when I will visit next. I didn't call back that day. I called the next, and she had already decided not to be sad about it. I liked the neatness of that closure. Guilt is easier to stack in even piles than to hold in your hands.
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Another memory comes with motion: a bicycle with crooked handlebars. I push it up a hill too steep to be worth it because the bus passed and I had a stubborn minute to spare. A dog barks behind a fence, and I pretend not to be afraid of being bitten. I am drenched in sweat when I reach the top, and I hate the class I will be late for, and I hate myself a little for being late. But the view from the top makes me forgive myself, briefly. The city spreads out in blocks of sun and shadow. I feel very small and very correct about that smallness. Something in me liked to be exactly the size I was.
I will not be allowed to be small here. The thought is not a premonition. It is a fact I press into slowly, like a bruise I need to locate.
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The first real tremor of change starts not with the hum but with my new mother's body. Something tightens around me that has never tightened before, a wave pushing from one end of my world to the other. It is uncomfortable, then almost pleasant, and then uncomfortable again. The ordered warmth comes touched by urgency—nothing like panic, more like the procedure's heartbeat.
I do not think of this as an ending. I am too small for endings. I think of it as an instruction I cannot refuse or understand. The wave laps and recedes. Another wave arrives. There is a set time between them. Inside that time, a thought hatches: I can do more than attend. I can ask.
It seems absurd to ask anything of the current beneath the current. I am a passenger, and it is the river, and the river does not answer to the leaf. Still, when the hum rolls through on the next pass, I turn my attention like a hand into the flow, and I try to do the smallest possible thing.
I try to lean.
It is not controlled. It is not even a direction. It is the suggestion of a new angle, the breath you take before you tilt a pitcher so the water goes where you want. I shape my wanting into that angle, and I do not expect anything to happen. That seems to be the trick. When I expected the world to open before me in the other life, it remained a locked door and made me apologize for knocking.
But something does happen. The hum that usually brushes past me passes… closer. It slides along my shoulder and down my spine, and the sensation sinks deeper into me now instead of skipping across me like a stone. Heat—not temperature, that other kind—gathers beneath the skin I do not yet have words for. The feeling is intimate and ancient, as if I have pressed my back against a tree and the tree has decided to press back.
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My surroundings change. It's subtle, yet I was sure something had happened. I try again, because what else is there to do? The next wave of warmth passes, and I lean into it more, not grasping, not pulling, not tugging at the weave like a greedy child at a loose thread. I picture—I don't have pictures, but the mind is stubborn—I picture my palm cupped in a stream, redirecting water toward my wrist and not away. I am careful because I have learned in an hour or a lifetime that carefulness is a form of devotion.
This time the warmth curls, just at the edges, like steam turned by a quiet breeze. It brushes my chest and flows in me, quickly finding a place inside that feels like a socket it was always meant to fill. The socket ignites. A line runs from there down through the cord at my middle and back up around my ribs. My heart—the small bird inside me—starts to race, and I try to soothe it the way I have learned to soothe it. The big heart remains steady. The room does not flare. The river listens as I fade.
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A memory arrives like a warning: sophomore year, the first time I realized I could write a sentence that made another person's face change. It was a small essay about a small story, and I made a point with more fervor than accuracy, and the teaching assistant grinned at me after class as if she had heard a secret and said, "This one had teeth." I got drunk on that and tried to make everything have teeth after, and people stopped reading because no one wants to be bitten all the time. I learned, slowly, that power needs to be measured to be worth anything.
I do not bite this current. I give it a place to go. How long has it been since I tried influencing it? I do not know, yet the changes in me are palpable. I could hold my thoughts longer even without the surge of warmth.
The next contraction grips me. The pressure is glorious and terrible; it fits me too well. Everything tightens. I do not panic. I do not because there is nowhere to go if I do, and because the small control I have earned might scatter like birds if I hesitate. I lean again, more certain now than when I first started, less like a request and more like a conversation. The warmth that has started taking me seriously rushes closer, pouring into the cupped space I make for it with attention. It moves with the contraction, as if the two are friends or perhaps simply neighbors who agree about fence lines. It slides along my spine and floods my little hands. Fingers I did not know could feel hot, feel hot without pain. I want to clap, to make noise with joy, and I can do neither, so I breathe in the ghost-practice way and let the joy move back across the current as permission.
Permission is the right word. That is what the river needed from me. Not command. Not supplication. Permission to stick for a second instead of rushing by. Permission to be part of me and not only around me.
I am aware now of the place where the warmth gathers best. It is a center that is not my stomach or my heart. It sits between both and lower, where the cord meets me. When I let the warmth pool there, the hum sings like a plucked string, and my small body responds by loosening around the parts that try to cramp. The contraction still tightens, but not all of me tightens with it. I feel like a knot that remembers how to untie itself.
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I lean once more. It is the simplest gesture I have ever made, so little effort that I want to cry from the power of it. I am a leaf. The river remains the river. And yet—
—yet something inside me receives a shape, clicks together like a puzzle you could not finish because a piece was missing, and you realize the piece was your attention. The sensation is clear as water and precise as thread.
And for the first time since the dark wrapped me, a sliver of text—not sound, not hum, not anyone's voice—rises at the back of my mind like a small, lit sign:
[Skill Gained: Chakra Control]
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AN - Hey guys, been a while huh?