The past week had felt like a dream. None of it seemed real. None of it felt real. None of it should have been real.

She remembered thinking it was strange that she hadn't run into any hitches. She thought that, maybe that was why the past week felt so surreal. Whenever she flew, there was always something – a switched bag, a charger she forgot to pack, a reassigned gate that she needed to track down from across the airport, delays due to mechanical issues, even flight cancellations or reassignments. This time, there was nothing wrong. Nothing to delay her, though she wanted nothing more than to be delayed.

It wasn't her first time in America. She had been before, a year ago, a year before that, and a year before that. She started making yearly trips to America when she turned eighteen. She was aware that these yearly trips were staggeringly costly, and that she was lucky that she only had to pay half. But they were each dearly important to her, and she spent the remainder of the year saving up for and looking forward to them. They were, ever and always, trips to see her best friend.

The first one took them to Niagara Falls – the American side, for her best friend didn't have her passport yet. The trip had been heavily packed with activities, wherein they managed over fifteen miles of hiking in the state park over a three-day period. Then, when their legs were jelly and their hands hurt from clutching hiking poles, Kaðlín and her best friend rented a car and traveled to New York City. She remembered that entire trip as being astonishingly dichotomous, and she felt a little shell shocked for the ludicrous amount of people they saw in the City, but she adjusted as best she could. They visited libraries, saw a symphony, shopped until her best friend maxed out her credit card, and stayed at an incredible AirBnB that overlooked a marvelous little shopping area. Most of all, though, she remembered her best friend gifting her a pair of ruby studs that never left her ears in the years to come.

The second trip was to Yellowstone Park. Kaðlín remembered being terribly hesitant about the trip, for she understood Yellowstone to be an active volcano area. Nevertheless, her best friend assured her that it wasn't going to blow anytime soon, that all the steam venting out from Old Faithful and the other geysers were a sign that the volcano was venting appropriately. They'd had an hours long chat over Discord at the time, she recalled – so much painstaking explanation was given to her about the mechanics of volcanoes, and how trapped pressure was how they finally blew, so seeing steam rising out of the ground was more of an assurance than a threat.

Finally, Kaðlín agreed to go. They spent two full days in Yellowstone National Park. Then they moved onto Coeur d'Alene, then Steptoe Butte, then down into Crater Lake from Washington. Multnomah Falls was after that, then Kaðlín was getting on a plane to Iceland from the Portland International Airport. She remembered still feeling giddy, even as her butt hit the seat on their first plane across the United States, for the trip was such a whirlwind of an experience that she thought she would never get over her excitement.

But her third trip was different. They weren't hiking through picturesque state parks or blowing all their money at posh boutiques in a city that never slept. Her best friend, who funded the majority of their trips together, was much more limited in her cashflow now, and Kaðlín understood why. A few months prior, her best friend had a little girl who not only brightened her world, but took up much of her time and money. Kaðlín was happy for her at first, but became apprehensive soon afterward when her best friend began making a multitude of changes, and asking heavy tasks of her.

She remembered that trip with such clarity for its utter bizarreness. Hours after she got off the plane, she and her best friend were sitting in an attorney's office. On her friend's lap was the child who was a stranger to Kaðlín until that day. Behind them were her best friend's parents, who seemed just as confused as Kaðlín felt. She heard the words spoken to her by the attorney, but couldn't fully comprehend what was being asked of her. Regardless, she said yes. Regardless, she signed the paper.

There was a will, too. Her best friend assured her that all of this was just a precaution, that she wasn't in any sort of trouble, that she wasn't sick with any terminal illness. She just had a baby, she had said. She wanted to make sure everything was in order for her little girl.

They spent that vacation in Destiny City, and only in Destiny City. They visited North End park, but left hours before nightfall. They visited the malls, but they spent more time walking around and window shopping than they did visiting the stores themselves. Her best friend took them to some delightful gastropubs, but she seemed paranoid about which ones she would visit and which ones she would avoid, and never explained to Kaðlín why certain ones were off-limits. Never were they out past seven PM, and as often as her friend said it was for her baby, Kaðlín had her doubts. She kept them to herself.

For months afterward, the trip left her feeling off. But each time she sat down at the computer to confront her friend about it, her friend assured her that nothing was wrong. After so many iterations of the same conversation, Kaðlín forced herself to let go of the feeling.

Another few months went by. Life fell back into its normal rhythm, and Kaðlín became absorbed in finishing her schooling. She'd had her own career to worry about, her own friends, her own family. Her sister inexplicably died of a massive electrical event that left the family shocked. For a while, she paid less attention to school, to work, to life as it passed by around her. She logged fewer hours online. She went a month without talking to her best friend.

The blow from the loss hadn't faded, but Kaðlín learned to start living around it. Her grades dipped, then she worked to bring them back up. She worked with her instructors, who granted her a measure of leniency due to her sister's death. She'd gotten back into hiking. Then she got in touch with her best friend again.

But something changed. She was too excited, too animated. She went on at length about milestones with her daughter and in such great depth that Kaðlín questioned how she could remember all that minutia. She began logging on at increasingly irregular and erratic times. She would ask Kaðlín questions without any context, and as the weeks wore on, those questions became increasingly moralistic and philosophical. Kaðlín questioned where all of this was coming from, but she never received an answer. Nevertheless, she resolved to support her friend.

This was to be her last trip to America. Her last trip to Destiny City. This time, she paid her plane fare in full.

This time, there were no national parks to visit. She wouldn't be perusing malls or visiting historical landmarks to learn of their significance. There would be no symphonies, no concerts, no plays.

She remembered checking all of her bags when she departed, knowing she would be too distracted to keep track of them. Her tote was with her, sitting in the empty folding chair next to her. She realized that she had left the luggage tag on the handle. It had been six hours since she touched down and got herself acquainted.

Kaðlín had reached over to tear it off. The glue was stubborn, but it came apart and she crumpled the article into a ball. She hadn't yet found a trash can for it when one of the doctors caught her attention.

She couldn't remember the conversation, but she remembered that he kept calling her Kathleen. He wasn't the same doctor that she had spoken with over the phone. He spoke somewhat monotonously, and he looked like he wasn't much older than her best friend. He seemed to have no idea what to say to her, precisely, or how to offer any empathy. Kaðlín assumed that he didn't have any empathy for her. That this was beyond the scope of his experience and he didn't know how to relate to it.

That was fine, though. She didn't know how to feel about it, either.

She was numb to the recap. He stated that Aileen had been in a coma for two weeks. That they couldn't determine a cause, so they labeled it idiopathic. She remembered that word in particular, idiopathic, because she thought it must be related to idiot. It was 2023, surely people did not lapse into comas without competent medical professionals knowing why. Worse was his next comment, where he stated that spontaneous and inexplicable comas were not uncommon in Destiny City. She didn't understand that, either.

Why would the city matter? Why would comas be common? Was she speaking to a real medical professional, or some poor faker?

She had asked if there was someone else with whom she could speak. He obliged, and after a tense phone call, he brought in the neurologist. He was a much older fellow, and when she asked him how long he worked in the field, he gave her a timeframe that was twice her lifespan. He said that her best friend showed no evidence of brain activity. That she didn't even twitch her eyelids or engage in any automatic processes aside from her heart. He, like the first doctor, could not explain why this happened. He still looked her in the eyes, though. He still knew to apologize with enough practice that he seemed genuinely empathetic.

She thought he was. He looked hurt in a way that watching a stranger die shouldn't have hurt someone. She wondered if he had someone in his life who was in the same position – someone who, one day, lapsed into a coma and no one could tell him why. Maybe he was far enough into his career that he told himself he should have known why. Maybe he had the MRIs and the CTs and the PETs and looked them all over once, twice, ten times and could come to no better conclusion than an utter lack of one. Maybe that was why he respected her decision unequivocally.

Kaðlín remembered feeling numb, when she went to Aileen's apartment that night. She remembered it started shortly after she met with the neurologist, and that the conversation that followed only worsened it. She remembered wondering if she might never feel again.

She knew, as she faced both these doctors, one a resident and the other an attending, that they were building up to a difficult conversation. The neurologist was careful to lay all the facts on the table: Aileen's coma had no known cause, so they would not know what to fix. She had no signs of brain activity whatsoever. She was on life support and was reaching the end of her health insurance's active period. It would expire at the end of the month, unless Kaðlín would apply for COBRA for her.

Aileen had a little girl, barely older than a year. Kaðlín didn't know who the father was. The little girl was staying with her grandparents. Kaðlín knew that she wasn't just deciding for Aileen, she was deciding for this little girl whether she would remember her mother's face, or her smile, or the little lullabies that Kaðlín heard coming out of the bedroom during her first visit to Destiny City. She was deciding whether she had a mom to call out for when she got hurt on the playground, or if Aileen would be there to drop her off or pick her up from school. She was deciding if Aileen's parents would have to bury their daughter.

Kaðlín was 21 years old. She remembered feeling like she was rotten on the inside. Like these doctors talked her into dying. But she knew that, whether she wanted to or not, she would live through that day. She would remember it for the rest of her life, however long or short that would be.

She and Aileen had a conversation like this before. It was, uncannily enough, a conversation concerning life support. Aileen was adamant that she didn't want to be on life support for long, but rather than supporting her decision, Kaðlín spent the better part of that day trying to understand from whence this conversation came. It was so utterly out of the blue that she couldn't fully follow Aileen's line of thinking, and they had gotten as far as Aileen asserting that she wanted a DNR before Kaðlín had to go to bed. But that DNR was one of the things that Aileen missed.

So it was on Kaðlín to follow through with her wishes. Kaðlín who, more than anything in the world, wanted her friend to fight whatever put her in this state and live on. Kaðlín who wanted her best friend's daughter to have a mom who sung her lullabies and gave her mac and cheese cups whenever she burnt dinner.

She had the final say over this life, but it wasn't her choice to make.

Kaðlín didn't remember saying the words; she remembered the head fog that came afterward. She remembered being sat down by people whose faces she wouldn't be able to recognize in a lineup while they talked to her about the importance of organ donation. She remembered thinking it was a ludicrous prospect to take her friend off of life support and then put parts of her body back on life support, like they were nursing a tomato vine until they had a reason to harvest the tomato. It seemed wrong to agree to donate someone else's organs when they couldn't make that call themselves.

She couldn't remember how she answered. She couldn't remember getting on the bus going back to Aileen's apartment. But she clutched her tote so tightly that her hands ached by the time she got off the bus, which reminded her of their first trip together. Kaðlín didn't cry until she reached the apartment.

She couldn't cry, though she wanted to. It was like her body stopped trying to do all but its most basic functions. She felt tired, so she kicked off her shoes and laid on the couch. It didn't seem right to use the bed. She stared up at the ceiling, counted the little popcorn dots until she spotted a stain like someone flicked paint onto the ceiling. She stared at it for a long while as she replayed the day, as she tried to reclaim the gaps in her memory.

Kaðlín never slept that night. She kept staring, wondering, when would the nightmare end?

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