Guys Like You

It was the noise that I heard first, the constant echoing hum that reverberated through my skull, filling my head until it felt like it was going to explode.

It was never ending, only getting louder and louder as I felt myself being pulled to the surface. Like I'd been swimming under deep water where everything was completely silent and all that you could hear was those small slivers of thought coursing through your brain every now and then.

That's where I'd been for as long as I could remember. Until something reached in and yanked me out me again, and everything was rushing back to me as I came closer and closer to breaking through the surface of the water, all my senses returning to me one by one.

It started off as a confusion of sounds; murmurs, broken frequencies and high pitched ringing playing over top of static, just like when you're trying to tune your radio. Then it all started to clear. Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom. Everyone's hearts were beating in my head, I could hear it repeating over and over, overlapping and all over the place.

"Ava?" a voice asked. The question broke through my subconscious like a hammer, as if the person had been standing next to me with a speakerphone and was yelling straight into my ear.

Then the smell hit me. Hospital. But not like any other hospital I’d ever been in. Normal hospitals try to mask the smells, disinfectants and air fresheners, and I could smell them too. Lingering, twining through the other smells, the smells they try to hide. Sharp tangy medicines all sickly sweet and acidic, plastic and burning, burning flesh and dying. The whole place smelled of death; it reeked of sickness and rotting, body fluids and blood. Blood. So much blood.

"Ava? Can you hear me? I need the stats – " the voice yelled again, zoning in and out of coherency. I couldn't understand why they were talking so loud. Why couldn't they whisper?

Someone was suddenly shining a light in my eyes, pulling back my eyelids and flicking the tiny torch back and forth then repeating it on my other eye. My brain immediately recoiled at the bright light like an explosion, every single nerve flared up with the intense pain.

Realization hit me like running into a wall. They were trying to revive me. I was in a hospital and they were trying to revive me. My eyes flew open immediately, vivid colours burning into my consciousness. Murky, disjointed images projected into my brain looking exactly like a kaleidoscope. When I titled my head they all rearranged, pieces fixing together at odd angles.

I gasped and choked on the thick air. "Stop!"

"Ava? Stop what, sweetie?" roared the person trying to wake me up.

"Stop – yelling – stop," I managed to gasp again. Something was wrong with me, I'd been unconscious before and when I came round it was nothing like this. Everything was too loud and too bright, the colours and sounds intensified a million times. And the smell, it was everywhere. The blood. I could feel it burning the insides of my nose.

And it hurt everywhere. Everything ached, the pain pouring through me like molten lava. I tried to escape, tried to swim away from it.

"Ava! You need to calm down. Oh god, someone get her a anesthetic – "

The needle slipped under my skin, piercing and biting into the soft flesh. Then the liquid pouring into me, I could feel the whole process burning through my body. I screamed, thrashing as hard as I could. Why were they doing this? Then the black was pulling me down under the waves again, but only just, so I floating directly under the surface. The noises were still there, just dimmer, the light was still piercing but murkier now, and the blood, still filling up my nostrils with it's warmth.
The only thing that disappeared was the pain and my brain getting foggier by the second.

What was wrong with me? What was happening?