The music changes again, so beautiful and tender and warm and rich that I want to cry for the sheer joy it creates in me: this music is mine, or maybe its the other way around, that I belong to the music. That’s it. It owns me. And then I understand: this man I see can’t hear this music. He doesn’t belong to it, to anyone, to anything. He wants to belong.

I want to gather the music in my hands, pluck the notes from the air like a bouquet of sound, and offer it to the sad man. I see him in my mind, and I see myself, hands outstretched, music flowing on the current of the air to surround him and hold him. I am desperate to do this; as the music builds and crests like waves on the ocean I know that it is telling me to do this.

Suddenly the music stops, the light is gone, and the water crashes in around me again. I am struggling for breath beneath its crush. I am freezing cold, my bones are like solid ice. I am desperately trying to swim back to the top, but the water is thick as tar, and I don’t get anywhere. There are explosions of light that jerk through my body, and then the water begins to drain away and I can breathe again. I am still freezing, but I am exhausted, and again I sleep.

And then I awake.

There were strange voices around me, and at first they seemed far away, like someone had turned the volume down, and all I was catching were the really loud bits—little intelligible islands in a sea of muffled noise. Then the volume began to rise, slowly, until I felt immersed in the world again instead of simply listening to it. There were beeps, the sound of metal striking metal, and voices: low voices, loud voices that were far away and angry, crying voices, and foreign voices. But the two nearest voices were familiar.

And then there was pain.

It hit me just as I was feeling comfortable in the world again, no longer under water and not in heaven. It slammed into me as if it was dropped from the top of the world, and I could hear it as it made contact with my body: a crash and thud merged into one otherworldly sound. I couldn’t figure out where the pain was coming from; there seemed to be a thousand focal points, but the shock waves rippling out from the epicenter all smacked together into one giant jumble of agony.