What that something was, I had no idea, but it was definitely hard… And if my inner ears weren’t deceiving me, it was horizontal… Not to mention wet. Overall, it was not an exceptionally painful feeling, but it was most certainly uncomfortable. Still, combining the uncomfortable with the excruciating and then multiplying it by a healthy measure of confusion- well, when you did the math, it all pretty much took on the same properties, none of which could be considered any more desirable than any of the others.

I wondered for a moment if the wet portion of the present feeling was, in part, the blood I thought I tasted. It seemed logical: it was wet, warm, and in the vicinity of my face. Unfortunately, I was forced to abandon the whole idea with urgent haste in order to escape the sharp stab of pain in my skull that the simple act of wondering about it had invoked. Apparently, at this particular moment, my brain wasn’t much interested in logic or anything else for that matter.

Between throbs, I noticed that my forehead felt cold. Not just cool but actually flat-out, ice pack cold. It was the only portion of my head that wasn’t embroiled in pain at the moment, but judging from the sensation it was announcing to me, that might only have been because it was well on its way to numb. Of course, it hurt to think about that too.

It occurred to me that there was something else just as disturbing as the pain. A pair of something’s actually: One, I had no idea what had happened to me in order to bring about this level of agony; and two, I didn’t know where I was. If I actually knew the answers to the two questions, I couldn’t remember them, and that wasn’t good either. I briefly considered the idea that I might be able to obtain one of the answers simply by opening my eyes. However, considering and doing are two different things entirely, and it seemed my eyelids weren’t listening to my brain right at this moment.

My vision wasn’t the only sense that was nullified either.