The Room Without Clocks

The Room Without Clocks

By VoiceWithin

They wheeled me into this room five days ago. Or five months. Or maybe I’ve been here forever.

There are no clocks here. No ticking. No rhythm to hold onto. Just the soft beep of machines and the sterile hum of fluorescent lights. Time is a ghost in this room — not seen, only suspected.

The bed is cold even when I’m warm. The walls breathe when I don’t. I blink and the light changes. I sleep and wake and sleep again, but the line between those states blurs like watercolors in rain.

This is what illness does.

Not just to the body — but to everything you are.

---

They told me it was neurological at first. Some inflammation. Something in the brainstem, maybe autoimmune, maybe trauma-triggered. They weren’t sure. “We’re still running tests,” they say. But tests don’t explain why my fingers forget how to close, why my name slips through the cracks of my memory, why I sometimes wake up crying without knowing what I dreamed.

The body collapses quietly, like a house that no longer remembers its foundation. The soul follows slower. It lingers in doorways. It waits.

I used to be someone. I had a voice. I spoke on stages. I laughed until I ached. I kissed someone in the rain once and felt like I could fly.

But here?

Here, I don’t even know if I’m breathing right.

---

The nurses are kind. Or maybe just efficient. Their voices are soft, like wind moving through curtains. One of them calls me “honey.” She smells like mint and writes notes on a chart at the end of the bed. I watch her sometimes, wondering if she sees me or just sees the numbers I’ve become.

Heart rate: 62.

Blood pressure: 97/60.

Oxygen saturation: 92%.

Conscious but unresponsive.

Unresponsive.

What a brutal word for someone still screaming inside.

---

The nights are the hardest. Silence is louder when you’re trapped inside it. Thoughts multiply like shadows. I hear things — not sounds exactly, but fragments. A child’s laugh. A man’s voice saying “I’m sorry.” A piano melody I can’t name but feels like it was once mine.

I’ve started seeing them, too.

Not people. Not exactly.

Versions of me.

The one who ran barefoot on hot pavement as a kid, chasing butterflies. The one who kissed that boy behind the school. The one who failed her first exam and cried in a bathroom stall. The one who held her mother’s hand when the machines went still.

They come in flashes, like old film reels stuttering across the ceiling.

They don’t talk. They just look at me.

---

There’s a mirror in the corner of the room. Small, circular, high up. Probably for safety.

I hate it.

Some days, I stare into it and don’t recognize the person lying in the bed. Pale. Thin. Hair falling out in threads. Eyes that once sparked now dim with confusion. I wonder if the reflection feels the same way. If it looks down and thinks, “Who are you, really?”

---

A woman used to visit. I think her name was Aila. Or maybe that’s what I wanted her name to be.

She brought lavender with her. Not the flower — the smell. Like rain and memory.

She’d sit beside the bed and whisper stories.

“Remember the ocean? You used to say it made you feel infinite.”

Or,

“You told me you weren’t afraid of death, just of being forgotten.”

She hasn’t come in a while.

Maybe I imagined her.

Maybe I forgot her.

Or maybe she forgot me first.

---

Time doesn’t heal all wounds.

Sometimes it just hides them behind thicker walls.

The doctors say my condition has “plateaued.”

No better, no worse.

Like a life paused on the edge of breath.

They talk around me. Like I’m furniture with a heartbeat.

I want to scream.

To ask, “Am I still in here? Or did I leave when the clocks stopped ticking?”

---

One night, something changed.

I had a dream.

I was standing — not lying — in a field of tall grass. The sky was lavender, like Aila’s scent. A wind moved through me, not around me. I felt weightless. Whole.

In the distance, I saw a house. Small. Wooden. Lights on inside.

I walked toward it. The door creaked open.

Inside, the walls were covered in pictures.

Of me.

Every age.

Every version.

Me in braces, in graduation robes, in hospital gowns.

Me smiling.

Me terrified.

Me living.

At the center of the room, a clock.

It wasn’t ticking.

It was glowing.

I reached out.

Touched it.

---

And woke up.

For the first time in… forever, I could feel tears. Real ones.

The nurse gasped.

“You moved,” she whispered.

And I wanted to say, “I remember.”

I remembered who I was.

---

Now, I wait.

Not for a cure.

Not even for visitors.

I wait for myself.

Each day, a little more of me returns.

A word.

A smell.

A heartbeat in rhythm with something deeper than machines.

I may never leave this room.

But I will not vanish.

I will write my name on the walls of silence.

I will hum the piano melody I still don’t know but feel in my bones.

I will speak — even if only in memory.

Because in a room without clocks, the only way to measure time…

…is by the soul’s refusal to disappear.

---

End.