Morphine Ghost

The morphine taught me that gravity was only a suggestion. I remember lying in my hospital bed, feeling my body soften until it slipped effortlessly through the mattress and into the cold linoleum beneath it. I could feel myself dissolving, my atoms mingling with the atoms of the floor tiles until I no longer knew which pieces belonged to me. Then I drifted downward through packed earth and tangled roots, settling into the quiet darkness beneath the hospital where there were no alarms, no doctors, no questions—only the patient embrace of the soil. It felt like returning to the place I had always been meant to rest. Then someone called my name, and I opened my eyes in the activities room with a deck of cards in my hands and a half-finished puzzle on the table. Everyone insisted I had been there the whole time, but I could still feel grains of dirt between my fingers, as though a small part of me had never quite made it back.