It was a grey Monday, just like every other Monday had been before it. The only difference was that by all accounts, especially listening to my mother crying over the phone about it to my Aunt Tracy, it was a miracle that I was alive to see this one. It was three months ago when my accident happened, if I can even call it that. It was more like fate. Fate that I missed my school bus, fate that I almost died and ended up here, wherever here is, in a scene straight out of the pages of a comic book. Scratch that, not even Stan Lee’s imagination could have come up with something like this. To be honest with you, I’m still not even sure if I really haven’t gone crazy. In the dreams, or rather nightmares, since the accident, according to my Guardian Angel who looked just like my pet cat, Piccolo, I’m now actually seeing the worlds for what they truly are. Who am I to disagree with a talking cat? There’s more that happened, but that’s the only part I cared to remember. The rest of my dreams made it hard to sleep at night.
I tried counting all
the light poles on my side of the road on the way home from the hospital. It’s a longer ride than you’d expect, all the
rain in Seattle slows things down more times than not. The entire car ride was
the embodiment of how it looked outside and how I had been feeling inside, numb. Not because when you slip stepping out of the
shower, crack your head on the toilet on the way down, and almost end up dying
on your own bathroom floor they give you a lot of pain killers to deal with all
the trauma and surgeries. No, it wasn’t
that at all. It was the head injury, the
damage to my prefrontal cortex from what the doctors say, that left me feeling
like this. It took away everything that
made me who I am, at least who I used to be, Adam Carter. Before the accident, I was a eighteen year old
state-bound collegiate wrestler who was always on the honor roll and the proud
vice president of his senior class. Now,
I can’t find an ounce of care for any of those things. It just all seems kind of pointless. Doesn’t anybody else see how false all this
feels? The little snippets of my dreams
feel more real than what’s supposedly reality.
My mom keeps trying her best to get me to talk, or at least smile, going
on and on about how everything is going to back to normal before I know it, how
the doctors say injuries like this take time to heal and that I need to be
patient. She also uses this as the
opportunity to inform me that we are going to have a “small” celebration dinner
with all the family for my homecoming.
Small is my mom’s way of saying, “Seating for one hundred, please.” And what is normal anymore? If I told anyone the dreams I’ve been having,
that’s the last thing they’d say I was.
I just kept staring out the window counting the light poles. Eighty-seven,
that’s how many I counted on the car ride.
We pulled into our driveway and I could already see shadows
dancing against the curtains, too many for my liking. I started feeling tense, burying my
clinching fists deep into my Columbia jacket pockets, shielding them from my mother's eyesight.
“Mom, you said this was supposed to be a small
dinner thing. Why is half the block lined up with cars?”
My mom looked at me with tears in her eyes. “I know, and I’m sorry. Everyone just loves you so much and we came
so close to losing you. Please don’t be mad at me.”
“I know, I love you too.”
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