I lay in the hospital bed for weeks because I was not strong enough to carry myself, because my body had become something that required witnesses. The bed knew the shape of me better than I did. It hummed and adjusted and lifted my knees without asking. When I slept, people watched the rise and fall of my chest the way you watch weather from a window, afraid the pattern might change without warning. They were afraid of my sleep, as if rest itself could tip me into danger, as if closing my eyes was a rehearsal for something irreversible.

People watched me sleep with an attention that felt heavier than wakefulness. Sleep made them nervous. Sleep meant silence, and silence meant they leaned closer to monitors, searching for proof that my heart was still deciding to work. Each breath became a small performance. Each exhale reassured them. I learned that rest could frighten others more than pain ever did. Nourishment came only in liquid form, thin and measured, sliding down my throat without resistance. Cups, tubes, ounces. I learned the taste of being alive when it had been stripped of pleasure. Everything counted. Everything watched. The body became a shared project. Even my hunger felt supervised.

On the television there was only a single channel, and it played a show about fish. I did not choose it; it was default. The screen flickered blue and silver, an aquarium I could not enter. I watched scales catch the light like small, perfect shields, each one fitted precisely to the body it protected. There was no excess, no waste. The fish did not question their design. They moved as if they trusted the water to be difficult. Schools moving in dense coordination. Bodies cutting water without hesitation. Scales catching light in precise, overlapping geometry. Each scale appeared perfectly placed, not decorative but necessary, armor that moved. Watching them, I thought about how protection does not slow them down. It enables them.

The herring fascinated me most. How they gathered themselves into a living geometry, how no single fish was responsible for the shape yet every fish was essential to it. Their scales overlapped like quiet agreements, like promises made without language. Each one reflected light away from danger, confusing predators, scattering threat into harmless brilliance. Resilience, I learned, does not always look like standing alone. Sometimes it looks like knowing where to place yourself among others.

I watched the herring weather the waters, their bodies bending but not breaking, their movement a kind of collective breath. They did not panic at the pressure of the current. They read it. They answered to it. I wondered what it would feel like to trust my body that way again, to believe it could adapt instead of collapse. I wondered if strength could be learned by observation, if watching survival was a form of practice.

In the bed, my body felt singular and exposed. Every weakness was mine alone. There was no school to absorb the shock. No shared motion to borrow. My heart worked in isolation. My muscles waited for instructions they could not follow. I envied the fish not for their speed, but for their coordination. Their ability to persist without self-consciousness. I wished I could move the way they did, trusting motion instead of fearing it. I wished my body could remember how to be part of something larger than its own fragility. The herring endured because they were many, because their strength was collective and adaptive. Lying there, monitored and still, I held onto that image: scales flashing, bodies aligned, surviving water that never stops moving.