Saturday, December 5, 2009

Tales of a Drunken Degenerate, part seven, copyright 2009 Robert J. Day


Tales of a Drunken Degenerate, part seven, A Near Life Experience
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You can tell by the smells (rubbing alcohol with just a hint of Death) and sounds (the hushed voices of nurses and doctors and the intermittent beeping of some sort of machine) that you're in a hospital. For some reason you're unable to open your eyes or make a sound, but aside from that strange sensation you feel fine, you not in any pain that you're aware of. You keep trying to speak, to call out to the darkness and ask where you are and what the hell happened, but the effort is making you very confused and tired, so you finally give up and just lie there. Maybe you sleep a little, it's hard to tell, but eventually you hear a familiar voice.
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It's your mother. "Wake up son." she whispers, and you can feel her hand in yours, warm and reassuring. "Wake up. It's time for my baby boy to wake up now. Wake up and look at me." She sounds scared. It's freaking you out a little, so you struggle against the darkness, and only fall deeper into the bottomless pool of black that surrounds you. You decide it's not so bad here the nothingness. For in a world of nothing; there can be neither pain nor sorrow. You give in and let it take you.
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Just when it seems that you're crossing over into some new place, the universe is suddenly filled with bright light, and you feel pain like an electric shock traveling from your chest through your whole body. You can see now, and while you're not yet ready to speak, you hear yourself gasping for air, as you breathe in lungfuls of canned oxygen through the plastic mask covering your mouth. You're alive again, but you're not really sure how you feel about that.
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You see your mother come back into the room after they wheel away the cart that holds the shocking machine. She's been crying. You manage to reach out to her, weakly, and once again you can feel her hand in yours, only this time it feels cold and clammy. You want to tell her not to worry, that everything will be okay, but your words come out all wrong, you're speaking some kind of gibberish, like they zapped you all the way back to when you were two. Then it's black again, but not the same all-encompassing nothingness of before, you've merely fallen asleep, exhausted.
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Some time later you wake up. Your mom is still holding your hand, asleep in a chair next to your bed. Even deep in her slumber, she can somehow sense that you're awake, and she opens her eyes. After several failed attempts, you manage to croak out "Hi mom" and she starts to cry again. "I'm okay." you say, and she cries harder. Her tears of sadness and grief or whatever abruptly become tears of anger.
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"You are NOT okay!" she's yelling now. "You fucking died, and I had to sit here and watch it happen! I've been watching you slowly kill yourself for years! You died, right here in front of me! I can NOT do this shit anymore! I WON'T! It's not fair to me and it's not fair to your father, or to any of the people that love you! I don't know why you're so determined to end your life with drinking and drugs, but I can't be a witness to your suicide anymore!" She gets up and walks out the door. You want to call out to her and tell her not to go, to come back, but you just can't find the words. You're left all alone, with just your thoughts for company.
TO BE CONTINUED...

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