But I can hear her... I have been quite still as I lay, years passing by me gently and without fanfare or care; my eyes stay closed, my body sunken, and my muscles withered and useless, a soft, seductive, persistent beep-beep-beep of life-sustaining machinery always echoing, perched somewhere just behind my head. I don't know why I am kept here, or why I am kept alive at all; and yet I am. And those who put me here, who keep me here, they come and go, night and day, men, women, children, even an occasional pet; nurses, doctors, family, friends, strangers; they talk to me rarely, sometimes to themselves, and frequently to each other, or to no one and to nothing. And they have very much to say, I have found. And they don't know that I can hear them. But I can... "What a morning," a nurse grumbles. Perhaps it doesn't matter... "I know," another answers.
