Hope.
The prospect of something good.
They weren’t giving me too much of that anymore.

I’m not sure how that made me feel. I hadn’t woken up since it’d happened, so I guess it hadn’t really sunken in yet.
I wouldn’t say I was old, and I wouldn’t say I was that much of a bad person either. I mean, nobody’s perfect, but I don’t think that I deserved getting dealt such a shit hand. A bad day, fine. Dead pet, never mind.
A mishap in the operating room?
When this was meant to be a minor procedure?

Something that you can’t recover from?

Who can you say honestly deserves that?


I never thought I’d be the one to say it, but I’m missing all of those simple things. It’s cliché that I am, but cliché things are cliché for a reason, and I was missing things like the sun.
Sunrise.
I can’t remember the last time I was up for a sunrise.
I suppose it doesn’t really matter, but this is what the waiting does to you.

But the waiting’s not the most unbearable thing. It’s not forgetting what the sun feels like on your skin, or forgetting how beautiful the moon is, or how un-green the grass is compared to the movies, no.
It’s knowing that they’re all around me.
Everyone I love is here.

I can’t see them though. I lost all feeling in my body a while ago now, something about brain damage. I can’t control my own body anymore, it’s like it no longer belongs to me. It’s like it’s just a weight keeping me here. A sort of, fleshy cage.

But I could hear all of the life support machines I was on. I could hear all of my family around me, but I couldn’t see them, or open my mouth to begin to attempt to make my voice work, and that was the most unbearable thing, because everyone knew that I wasn’t going to make it.
That much was obvious now.
I’d come to terms with it, because I didn’t have a choice.
This was it.
This was my deathbed, and these breaths being forced into my lungs by one of the many life support machines around me were the last few breaths that my lungs were ever going to process. The last few atoms of oxygen that I was going to use up were starting to swirl down the tube helping my body to breathe.

All the more air for the rest of the world.

But I just want to talk to them, I want to respond to them and talk just one last time because they’re all here.
My parents. My wife. My children. My siblings. All of my family, even the ones I haven’t spoken to for years, even the ones I’ve fallen out with.
Everyone I love is here.
Everyone.

And I’m not kidding when I say that I can sense them all doing the same thing, because I am too. Hoping. We are all hoping.

Come on God, please, it’s time for a miracle.

And then I start to panic.

I don’t want to die.
I don’t want to have to leave, why now? Why does it have to be me?
That’s not the worst thing.
It’s not just me is it?
It’s all the people that are going to be left behind. They think they’re strong but I know that they’re all going to cry. I need to recover, I can’t leave them. I’m not ready to go. Everyone I love is here.

Simultaneously I’m wondering why I’m still here. Why my thoughts haven’t switched off yet, and suddenly I have this horrible thought that I’ll be here like this forever, with the false notion that someone else is privy to my thoughts as I’m thinking them. Maybe I’m hoping too much. Hope. As if that ever did any good.