Recovery, Apparently

Everyone wanted to know what actually happened.

Doctors. Parents. Nurses. Even my brothers, who pretended not to be curious but absolutely were.

The official version went like this:

Minor accident. Brief loss of consciousness. Stress response. Memory disruption. Nothing dramatic enough to explain why I woke up slightly… off.

The unofficial version?

I died, upgraded bodies, and came back with zero motivation to explain myself.

Since no one could prove the unofficial version, we all politely agreed to the first.

Recovery, it turned out, was mostly sleeping.

A lot of sleeping.

The kind where you wake up, blink at the ceiling, consider the meaning of existence, decide it’s overrated, and go back to sleep. My body seemed to need it, so I complied. I’ve always been good at resting.

Between naps, I read.

Not textbooks. God, no.

Curriculum books sat untouched on my desk like disappointed relatives.

Instead, I reached for whatever was lying around the house.

My father’s shelves were full of legal books—case studies, memoirs, arguments laid out like elaborate chess games. I read them the way one reads thrillers. People lying. People winning. People losing everything because they chose the wrong word.

Interesting, but exhausting.

My mother’s books were worse.

Market behavior. Forecasting. Probability models. Past predictions annotated with quiet confidence. I didn’t study them—I read them like prophecy. Flip a page, nod, think yeah, that tracks, and move on.

The middle brother’s collection was my favorite.

Architecture books. Sketches. Concepts. Cities imagined before they existed. I traced lines with my fingers, appreciating how much thought went into making spaces people barely noticed.

The eldest brother didn’t keep many books.

But the ones he had were… dense.

Strategy. History. Leadership written by people who had survived things they didn’t talk about. I read those slowly, not because they were hard—but because they carried weight.

Somewhere between chapters, I realized something unsettling.

I understood all of it.

Not in a wow, I’m a genius way.

More like… this is familiar.

Like my brain recognized patterns faster than it bothered announcing them.

When I got tired of reading, I watched vlogs.

Travel vlogs. Study-with-me vlogs. People romanticizing productivity while I lay in bed doing none of it. I admired their dedication from a distance.

Occasionally, my mother would pass by and pause.

“You’re not bored?” she asked once.

I shrugged. “I’m deeply entertained.”

To keep my body from turning into furniture, I exercised.

Light stretches. Walking. Basic routines the doctor suggested. Nothing intense. Just enough to remind my muscles they still worked.