Somewhere in NYC

It takes a week and three days of speech therapy for you regain the power of speech to the level of which your family and friends can understand and you're told that's quick but it feels like a pretty infinite amount of time to you anyway. The conversations that you've been unable to have since you woke up thus far are long overdue. There are some conversations you just can't have with a whiteboard and a pen.

They've explained to you that you were in a road traffic accident and that the injuries to the rest of your body were luckily minimal. But your head took a heavy blow which knocked you all the way to a coma-like-state. Which is pretty damn terrifying, and you're not looking forward to crossing any roads any time soon. On the other hand you are looking forward to getting out of hospital, and those two things seem to be pretty heavily intertwined.

Your family and friends have visited every single day since you woke up and you are reminded of how awesome the people you love are. They stop you going insane from boredom and try to make it seem pretty much normal that you can't speak even though being unable to talk makes you upset one hell of a lot, and they're always there to comfort you when that happens.

Alex seems to have been happy pretending that the row didn't happen, but now you've got enough control of your tongue to hold a conversation it's one of the first things you want to talk about. It's nearly been driving you crazy being unable to.

Something you have noticed while you've been spending the majority of your time sat in quiet is that the voices of your friends and family that used to confuse you in your head have gone, and you wonder whether the collision literally knocked some sense in to you. No one has brought it up around you so you assume either no one knew anyway or it doesn't matter. Either way, you feel a lot happier for it.

Your family are currently visiting and apparently no one wanted to tell the hospital, or the hospital just doesn't care, that Alex isn't actually related to you and so he's here too. You're trying to crack a joke to make them smile as the amount of effort they're putting in to staying strong, smiley and energetic is almost tangible, and although you appreciate that they're trying to cheer you up, the atmosphere feels thick with the effort and it's tiring for you too. You use this tiredness as an excuse to ask them to leave, but ask Alex to stay with the explanation of "I need to ask him some questions about stuff, it won't take long". It sounds like you're talking your own special language as a result of your mouth still not wanting to enunciate words properly, but they seem to understand and leave quietly, your mom kissing you on the forehead before she leaves.

When the door clicks shut behind them Alex doesn't waste any time in moving round the bed and taking the chair closest to you, the one your mom had been sat in previously.

"So I see you're ignoring what happened then?" you say sternly, taking the opportunity to be blunt. "I see you're ignoring you're the reason I'm in here?"

His smile falters then drops completely.

"How... how do you mean I'm the reason you're here?" Wow. Good acting. If you didn't know better you'd believe he didn't know.

"Forgot about our fight did you?"

Alex still looks confused and it's beginning to get annoying.

"Drop the act, Alex."

"I have no idea what you're talking about, we hadn't fought in weeks... The last time we fought was... over ice cream... Is that what you're getting at?"

"Alex, I'm not going to fucking tell the cops, I just want to talk about it."

"We didn't fight! I- What?"

"Okay I'll jog your memory," you say exasperatedly. "We were in our apartment, you were shouting at me for not being 'the life and soul of the party', then you told me I 'ruined your life'. I'm not really sure how you could forget it."

Alex's features have slowly changed from looking confused to anxious to a mix between shock and heartbreak, and that's not what you were expecting at all. You were expecting a large proportion of guilt if he was half the decent individual you thought he was.

"Okay, first things first," he says, "you have not ruined my life and whatever idiot version of me said that is the most awful human being and a liar because if anything you've done the opposite, and I swear to you I have never said that." You look away from him because if you want to stay mad at him and he wants to play the 'you're the best part of me' card, you can't look in to his eyes while he does it because he's just too annoyingly good at acting the part.

"You know it's one thing to do this to me when my mind's all over the place, and by that I mean a shitty thing but understandable in a stressful situation, but now I'm in hospital after waking up from a coma, I thought you might have a little more respect for me. So stop playing this game and stop trying to make me feel crazy, because..." you trail off realizing how weak you would sound if you said 'because it's breaking me'.

"I don't think you're crazy, Jack. And I'm telling the truth, I promise."

"Right," you say, your voice dangerously bitter. "Fuck you."

"I haven't done anything!" he all but yells at you and you can't understand how he's managed to get angry at you and why he won't accept his part of the blame; why he has to play dumb mind games with you, because this really isn't the time.

"Can you leave."

"What?" he says, his voice a coming out a higher pitch than it usually would. You can't figure out why he's sounding so wounded. "Jack," he says slowly, "what's the last things you can remember?"

"I told you," you say angrily. "We had some people round to our place, I felt ill, you got angry, you told me I ruined your life, I ran out, I got hit by a car. So stop acting like you've got amnesia."

If possible, Alex looks even more confused after your re-run of the sequence of events that brought you to this place. You realize he genuinely looks worried for you, and your stomach begins to feel sick.

"I'll be back," he says quietly before getting up from the chair and quickly leaving the room.

It takes him about fifteen minutes to return, and when he does, he's with a man who introduces himself as "Dr. Franceschi, a therapist at the hospital" and he makes you reiterate what you just told Alex. You're beginning to get really tired of repeating yourself. After you tell him he says he'll be right back and you wonder why people are suddenly seeming anxious about your mental health.