Chocolate Chip Cookie

“Are you hungry?” A whisper asks me. I do not wake up. The room I am in is dark and shadowed, and the only source of light comes from a small blue fish tank across from me. It is one of those rectangular ones, with one seagull within it. It smiles at me as I got off the floor. In front of the cage is a single cookie. 

I take the cookie. I am not particularly hungry, but it seems the right thing to do at the moment. The seagull watches me with orange eyes. The cookie doesn’t feel like anything. I can see it in my hand, but I can not feel its weight. It is a strange sensation. Vaguely, I wonder if it has eggs in it. I was always allergic to eggs. 

“Why don’t you wake up now and find yourself some real food to eat?” The seagull suggests, very gently. I ignore its words and look at the cookie. It is chocolate chip, and a little soggy on one side. The smell of the hospital drifts from it faintly, leaving me unsettled. I decide to put the cookie back down. 

The seagull squawks once and disappears, leaving an empty blue fish tank. The light disappears as well. The room is still illuminated, as if the walls themselves were faintly glowing. A door opens behind me. I do not turn to look. Nobody enters the room. 

“Why are you still here?” Nobody asks me, “Why don’t you wake up?” I pick up the cookie again and turned around. I see Nobody standing at the door, as if afraid to come too close. I do not respond to it, just as I did not respond to the seagull. I take a step forward. Nobody plants its feet into the floor, knowing exactly what I want. 

The doorway is white, a contrast to the rest of the room. Beyond it, I can see a white nothingness, an empty blank space waiting to be filled. Nobody watches me. I watch Nobody. A meeting of minds, within a mind. 

Nobody opens its mouth. Within it, I see the remains of a cookie. “Why not wake up? They are waiting for you.” 

The world beyond the door shifts, slightly. I see a house, now, on the side of a beach. It is very quaint and small, the kind of house that retired people lived in or rented out as AirBnbs. I see a girl running up to the house, silently calling out confirmation that she had arrived. I step forward. Nobody stands still. 

“There is nothing here for you. Wake up.” Nobody truly believes that this is the best course of action. Of course, Nobody is wrong. There was a world of memory left here, in the recesses of my mind, pleasant ones to be explored. 

“The world is waiting out there. It won’t wait for much longer. Do you want to die?” This startles me. It is not something people ask other people genuinely in real life. My friends used to tease me like that, always laughing to show the jest behind their words. Nobody does not smile now. 

I do not respond, nonetheless. Nobody snarls suddenly, driven by a primal urge to survive. “I don’t want to die!” It yells, desperate and afraid. It is empowering to know that your choices can cause another fear. Even if that someone else is Nobody. I take another step forward. 

“Wake up!” Nobody’s voice blends with another person’s higher and more feminine, like a friend from another world. I ignore the voice. I understand what I must do now, if I wish to stay in this utopia forever. I slowly raise the cookie to my mouth. 

Nobody cannot move, suddenly. For the subconsciousness can only influence the consciousness so far, and ultimately the choice belongs to me and me alone. The seagull returns to the fish tank behind me with a jarring squawk, pecking at the glass walls desperately behind me. The house behind Nobody changes again, to the kitchen. 

I pause, considering. The world in my mind was mine, untouched by anyone else. I had seen this as I had fallen, a montage of my entire fourteen year old lifespan flashing through my head in a millisecond. ‘Time is relative,’ Einstein had said. 

Nobody watches, waiting for my choice. The seagull has gone silent, and I know without turning around that the fish tank will be gone from behind me. The scene behind the door shows two girls, and a platter of cookies on the table. We were inside the house, as my parents had rented a nice, seaside cottage for the summer vacation. 

My father and mother had left for the beach, biding us to hurry and put on sunscreen so that we could follow. I saw a seagull tapping at the window, beady orange eyes staring into the kitchen. So I went in, and found hot cookies lying on the countertop. 

I see the girl behind the door reach out for a cookie, gingerly tapping the tray once before picking one of the treats up. She bites into it. 

I look down at the cookie in my hand. Upon further inspection, the cookie’s color is slightly off, tinged green. ‘Mom and Dad enjoy cannabis occasionally,’ my sister once told me, ‘not enough to get addicted, it's just something they do. But don’t do it yourself. It's bad for you, and Mom would ground you until college if she finds out.’ 

I had told her that it was hypocritical. She just shrugged. Mom and Dad never had any allergies to eggs. Apparently my grandmother was the unlucky one, and the affliction had skipped a generation to fall on me. Mom had always laughed at it, the chance of genetics. 

Behind the doorway, the girl falls. The space behind the door falls back to white. Nobody watches me. I watch Nobody. Do I want to die? I do not want to die. 

I throw the cookie down and stomp on it, very deliberately. 

“I would like to wake up now.” Nobody smiles.