Best I Can

I remembered everything from before that day when I woke from my coma. I was me. This was my body. This was reality.
The first thing I recognized was the uncomfortably thin bed supporting me that truthfully should not have had enough balance to accomplish that one task. Lying on it was so different from the position I had been in just before I blacked out in that accident. The oncoming car had swerved and rammed into me at just enough of an angle to flip my Jeep over the guard rail. At the bottom of the hill, the black ate my vision and sent me into the dream.
I almost didn’t realize it was a dream. Bits of my real life overlapped, but only enough to give it credibility. The bar on the corner of Tenth and Oak Street that we frequented. Darby’s Drug Store where I got my sandwich for lunch every day. Nothing had changed, but for the past two months (for that’s how long the doctors told me I had been incapacitated) I had been everything I had ever wanted. I was an architectural engineer, just like I had gone to school for. I had a house and a family. I had some of the best friends in the world that made sure I got home safe every weekend.
But there I was, lying in the uncomfortable hospital bed like the vegetable I had been turned into, so very different from everything I wanted. I had a hard time understanding why my arms and legs felt like they had turned to pudding. I had been fine just moments ago.
The second thing I noticed about that room was the ungodly sound bleating through small speakers beside my ear – the digitized whine of the newest song by the pop music industry’s whore of the year.
I summoned enough will to turn my head toward the irritating throb being thrown around the bare room and found a phone on my bedside table. A phone I recognized.
Sure enough, she was sitting in a chair at the end of my bed, her long toes propped up on the bed inches from mine. The rings of curls were piled on top of her head just like always and those long, electric red fingernails glittered in the artificial light, unchanged. She was looking over the top of the magazine in her hands, a knowing twinkle in her eyes.
“The doctors told me to play music you liked to help wake you up. But I know you better. So I played you something you couldn’t stand,” she told me later. “You should have seen your face!”
At that moment, all I can remember thinking about was how things might have been different if I’d never met her. How my world would look if I had pursued the engineering a little more enthusiastically and not settled for the enthralling career of a librarian. I still don’t want to say that it was regret that made me think that way.
Someday, I tried to tell her through a look, trying to convey the same meaning I felt after my prolonged dream. She just smiled at me, probably thinking I was thanking her in my own way since I still couldn't speak. I wouldn't correct her. After all, that promise was for me.