She woke up last night.  That’s how I know none of this is real.  Nearly two years in a coma and she’s back.  I should have taken her off the machines sooner.  Perhaps it’s because she wasn’t receiving enough nourishment anymore.  Either way she doesn’t recognize me or apparently herself.  She has yet to see what the world has become and I don’t quite know how to break it to her.  How to tell her what it has done to me.  I had a devil on my back before the outbreak,  a devil I could medicate and mostly treat away.  I’m blacking out again and not in the safe guilt free way where I wake up in the same place on the ground  No, I wake up mid-stride often on the other side of town gripping my machete so hard my fingers ache sharply.  And then there are my masks…

I realize a surgical mask and some sunglasses are probably enough to avoid getting infected blood in my eyes or mouth yet I need my masks again.  They feel safer and I just feel like myself inside them.  I was accosted about one today by a rather stubborn “officer.”  I doubt he was nothing more than some poor sap who found himself a uniform to feel important in.  He demanded I remove the mask because of some kind of town ordinance and even ordered a nearby bystander to shoot me if I refused.  Being as tired and unstable as I have felt I complied and quickly left the scene before I lost control.

Perhaps getting myself a position in the hospital will keep me distracted and my future wife healthy and treated.  I can’t cave into the nightmare not while it seems to have no end.