At first, he thought of nothing at all; his mind was a perfect blank, so much so that he wasn’t even aware of his own consciousness. He floated in the limbo of half-sleep, eyes open, blinking but unseeing as he waited for something monumental to occur, though he was totally unaware that he was waiting at all.

It was an immeasurable time later that something did occur: a stray thought, apparently unconnected to anything at all, drifted across the blank plain of his awareness. He wondered: where am I?

There was nothing profound in his thinking, no hint of the great questions all sentient beings come to ask themselves; he simply wanted to know where, exactly, he was located at the present time. ‘Who am I?’ would, perhaps, have been a more fitting question (as he honestly did not know) but such things were a little beyond his capabilities. He was apparently incapable of self-searching, merely thought, and even that was limited to a single question amidst the vastness of his strange existence.

Sometime later, when his question had hung unanswered in the desolate expanse of his mind, he began to form a shuttered awareness; all with the goal of answering the question that was his sole focus.

He was lying down; the fact came to him suddenly, though it was unconnected to the typical rush of sensation that a body should cause. He had not yet reached a level of consciousness that would allow him to connect his tactile senses. If he was lying down, his slow, faltering mind stated, then he had to be in a place where it was possible to lay down. That made perfect sense (as much as anything made sense) though it did little to answer his question.

Secondly (and he was beginning to form a timeline for himself; clinging to a linier model in the hopes of achieving some form of order) he noticed that it was not silent. He was somewhere populated, alive, and he struggled to pick through the sudden deluge of sound; fighting to make some sense of what he was hearing. At first, it simply confused and distressed him, threatening to sink him back into the blissful peace of dreamless sleep, but the dregs of an inner determination that he was unaware that he possessed kept him clinging to his newfound existence.

He knew that he was in a hospital long before he managed to locate the reasoning behind his certainty. Time had trickled on, though he had no will or means of measuring its passing, and the first thing that he was aware of seeing was a lamp in the darkness. It suited him perfectly, or so said the faint stirrings of a whimsical voice that he had yet to identify as his own consciousness. A single lamp, tilted down and away, throwing a muted circle of light upon and area that he could not see; he was only aware of the outermost ring and the shadows that it cast.

He watched the light in silent fascination, wondering at the secrets that it held, and waited for some new development. His question answered, he found himself at ease; no worry plagued him, no niggling unknown preyed upon his consciousness and for a while he was totally, ignorantly content.

He grew in the muddled silence and half light, aware with a blank mind, blind with eyes open and seeing; he learned to know himself, though no more questions were forthcoming. He lingered close enough to dreaming to stem the frantic flow of panicked searching that tended to accompany a total loss of oneself, and in so doing became accustomed to his own thoughts, limited as they were.

The footsteps halted his sluggish observation of self and shadow, and some previously unknown instinct commanded him to close his eyes. Trusting himself implicitly and lacking any underpinning logic to assist in the rationalisation of his actions; he did so, feigning sleep. He listened, hiding beneath the almost flawless cloak of semi-consciousness.

The soft, slightly squeaking footfalls seemed to be making progress around a larger area than his own small cocoon of light, making the world seem that little bit vaster to him. He focussed on the pattern of their movement over the sudden rush of agoraphobia, finding the repetitive thinking calmed him. Five times the footsteps moved; closer and further, but always approaching, before they were right upon him; he was uncertain, afraid, and torn between opening his eyes to see what monster had come at him from the dark and remaining hidden, apparently asleep and blissfully unaware.

He continued to feign sleep, unflinching as cool hands peeled back blanket and sheet with practiced ease, causing a sudden upswing in his level of awareness. The rush of physical sensation came with the desire to tense away from the invading hands, but he found himself incapable of doing so; the same warning instinct keeping him limp-limbed and unmoving as the faceless, nameless creature made a cursory examination of his person.

He learned in that moment that he was a man who found touch unsettling; the hands made him anxious in their own right, rather than because their owner was an as of yet unknown factor in his limited world. Why didn’t seem to matter, why was unimportant, he simply knew that he would far rather be without the skin on another resting against his own. Thankfully, the touch was brief; a few scant moments before he was redressed and covered, but for a creature that had essentially come into existence a handful of hours previously, moments seemed to last forever.

It was in the blissful absence of both hands and footsteps that he decided upon escape; a simple decision made by a simple mind.