Hospital “Sunspot”

"Life burns you when there is something you don't understand.

When you seek out answers, and the answers are not enough. It is something that is hard to heal from, because making sense of the world is simply something that we have to try to do in order to feel safe and sane.

But life burns hottest when there is something we can't understand, and that thing I can’t understand feels like hearing whispers from the sun. It runs through my mind like a high wind across a dry prairie. Part of me knows that it is natural, that the fire gives life to the seeds that sit under the surface.

When the fire passes, the seeds will grow.

And that is the problem. The seeds that are being prepared for are not ones that I planted. They are thoughts and feelings that came to me in dreams, both waking and sleeping. Glimpses of something both muted and in bloom.

The smell of it singes my nose hairs, and I often wake up to find the hair on my arms curled up and brittle and the smell of burnt hair in my nose. It takes days for that to pass, and in that time I may dream again, and when I do, I open myself back up to attack.

And I have tried so hard to fight back.

There are medicines that I take, ones that control blood pressure and are supposed to prevent nightmares, if not dreams in general. It has taken a fair bit of lying to get my doctor to assign them, and a few are things that I can't admit to taking.

Not legally.

But I don't have a choice. You have to understand that. Things are getting worse, and I can tell that the time for medicine will one day pass. The thing in my dreams, the one that murmurs like a star and talks about things that leave me in a daze for days on end...

I have learned a bit about its nature, and I know it to be wholly without compassion for the pain it causes. It seeks only to spread itself, to make its form known to as many as it can. But though I for a long time presumed that it only did this out of malice, or that simply it was its nature, and we were just too weak...

It has planted seeds within my mind, thoughts and ideas that are determined to not just destroy.

It wants to prepare me for something, and I can't imagine what. The last few nights I have glimpsed hints and pieces of divination. Or at least, what might be an act of prophecy or foresight. Maybe it is all just part of the preparation.

Or maybe I just can't really think straight as my temperature rises and the skin around my nails blisters. Maybe this is all just normal, a normal kind of pain for a normal kind of existence.

But maybe not.

I dream about the night sky, but when I look for it in the dream, I see nothing. There are no stars, and the moon cannot be seen even on a cloudless night. Even on the darkest night, when the moon is far from the light of the sun, there are always hints of its presence, breaks in stars and outlines of light dimly witnessed.

That is the way it should be.

If there is a sun."

The above was hand written and placed upon my desk.

I recognize that handwriting.

It's Eric.

For the last few weeks he has been in the hospital, recovering from surgery. On valentine's day, there was a large influx of patients who had been mutilated by “unknown” assailants”.

I say unknown, but that isn't really true. Maybe unaccounted for would be a better way of putting it.

A friend of his had dropped off the above account at the museum before I arrived at work this morning. I went to see Eric in the hospital after I got out, and though I admit I originally went to ask questions, I soon became simply concerned as to how he was doing.

If he was doing okay.

I didn't ask him what he might have done to cause someone to hurt him. Even if he would have told me, I don't think I would want to know.

I am not ignorant. No one does what they did to him without a reason, but I don't think I carry in me the desire to see Eric that way. And the truth is, anyone who has gone through what he has deserves sympathy and empathy, and whatever he did does not mean he deserved what happened.

This isn't how you should handle pain.

He is doing better thankfully. An advantage of people like The Surgeon and Margaret is that there is a fair amount of experience when it comes to skin grafts. His are holding up well, though the swelling hasn't really gone down as much as it will later, and the skin around the stitches is red and seeping.

All normal, he told me. It is to be expected.

We talked for a little while, though mostly I talked and he listened. It has been so long since I had been able to talk to someone in person outside of work, that the words just tumbled out of me.

I talked to him about the sleep medicine, comparing the different combinations that we were on. He had been struggling with it, and I was able to offer suggestions, but it was just nice to talk to someone who understood where I was coming from when I told people I took medicine to suppress dreaming.

The being he mentioned seems to be similar to The Glow that I have seen in several of my reports. It may not be the same thing, and I don't discount the idea that he is simply reacting to the same things I am. He is working with me, so we encounter the same information.

Though it would be cruel to assume he is lying, maybe he is using the imagery to deal with something else.

The last...almost a year...I have seen so many reports about living rot and the approaching dark, and though I don't believe in prophecy, I do think he believes in what he is dreaming, and that he may need to believe in what he is dreaming.

But for now his dreams need to stop. Whatever is trying to reach through is going to do lasting damage in his current state. I know this probably better than anyone.

He needs to get his rest. These stitches won't heal easily.

Whatever the truth, things do feel a lot like a puzzle lately. Pieces are missing and the box was lost, so the final image is unsure. But I think I need to seek out the answers, even if all it leads me to is perhaps a revelation that Eric has a repressed childhood memory or something like that.

And if it is something important, I am responsible for discovering it.

I am not yet positive about what is going on.

But I plan on finding out.