Six Months, 23 Days, 14 Hours, 33 Minutes Poem, by Friendship, at My poetic side

Six Months, 23 Days, 14 Hours, 33 Minutes

I woke with the taste of dust on my tongue,

a calendar of silence tucked beneath my ribs—

the world had turned,

the clocks had marched,

and I had lain still inside a darkened room.

They say a coma is a pause, a breath held too long,

a blank page waiting for ink.

But the mind does not surrender; it drifts, it gathers—

a tide of whispers, of half‑remembered songs,

of the humming of machines that became a lullaby.

In those six months, twenty‑three days,

fourteen hours, and thirty‑three minutes,

I learned the language of stillness:

the way a heartbeat can be a metronome,

how breath can be a pulse of thought,

how the absence of sight sharpens the scent of rain

that never fell outside the window.

When my eyes finally flickered open,

the world assumed I would emerge pristine—

a clean slate, unmarked by the years I missed.

They watched the clumsy ways I tucked my sleeves,

the tremor in my laugh, the pause before a word—

and called it “odd,” “broken,” “unlearned.”

But they forgot the quiet school I attended:

the syllabus of darkness, the lessons of waiting.

I learned to read the minute hand’s trembling,

to feel the weight of a second before it passes,

to hold a single breath like a secret confession.

So when you see my gestures—slight, hesitant, foreign—

remember the syllabus I memorized behind closed lids:

patience woven from sterile curtains,

resilience forged in the hush of machines,

and an awareness of time that no calendar can chart.

The world may not understand that some behaviors

are not born of habit, but of survival in silence—

that the body can learn a new rhythm while the soul is

suspended in a dream that was not my choosing.

And as I step forward, each footfall a lesson,

I carry the exact measure of my unchosen education:

six months, twenty‑three days, fourteen hours, thirty‑three minutes—

a precise stanza etched in my bones,

reminding all that even in the deepest sleep,

the mind never truly rests.