Where Are You Calling From? (Eve)

Janeece woke up much later than usual to a blinding pain behind her left eye – as though someone had touched a needle to an exposed nerve.

She found herself mysteriously in the clutch of a vicious headache, a malady from which she never usually suffered. For an interminable minute, light burned through her brain, and then, as suddenly as the pain had arrived, there was a merciful release.

Cuppa tea. That should fix my poor nerves, she thought.

What just happened there?, part of her was screaming internally.
As she watched herself in the familiar act of pouring boiling water from the jug, Janeece noticed how strange her body now looked to her. Something had shifted in the way she was seeing, an alarming disassociation from her normal conscious state.

Coincidentally, her headache had returned, more fiercely gripping than before. Terror began to take hold of her. As her body began to seize up, she wondered who could possibly help her. Walking towards the phone felt like a lead-footed trawl. Janeece’s muscles were disobeying her mental commands to tense or let go. She lost her balance, falling against the kitchen bench, but still standing.

The phone rang. Good, she thought. The way her body was betraying her, she was unlikely to have been able to dial out. Janeece pulled herself along to the end of the bench and just managed to grab the phone.

A cheery voice said, “Good morning. Is this Miss Taylor?”

Janeece, in this moment, was experiencing no pain. In fact, her mind had gone completely quiet, a silence like nothing she had experienced before. Her body felt as expansive as her mind and a remarkable peace infused her.

A less cheery and more concerned voice interrupted the silence. “Hello, hello, is someone there?”

Her headache came thundering back and a worse thing, paralysis of her whole right arm. Then, Janeece knew. She was having a stroke.

She found her voice and managed to speak words that to her sounded slurred and nonsensical: “This is Janeece Taylor and I need help!”

Somehow this kind phone worker was able to translate Janeece’s almost incomprehensible pleas for assistance, and then, prize the crucial details of her address out of her.

As Janeece alternated between a state of expansive surrender and one in which all of her senses felt tortured by overload, an ambulance was speeding towards her.

Hours later, when Janeece awoke in hospital, she was in none to good shape physically but she was alive. Moreover, she could still recreate the feeling of unalloyed bliss that she had experienced while she was “stroking”. The sense of mental spaciousness was related to feelings she had had in the past of freedom, peace and love, but magnified a million-fold.

In her almost mystical state, Janeece remembered the accented voice of a cheery telemarketer, and her heart almost burst with gratitude.