I died once.
I did it for about twenty seconds when I was only four years in this world. My little heart just gave up beating and my life went away. I was gone too long. For when they shocked me back into this world Id lost something in the retrieval. Id lost four years. I suppose I was lucky that the only brain damage I received was a total amnesia of my yet short life. So in a way, though I am twenty-five years in this world, sometimes I know that it is only twenty-one.
I sometimes try to imagine that moment when the heart monitor started wailing and the nurse called for the doctor. I try to imagine my mother and how she reacted. Did she hold her breath those whole twenty seconds? Was she standing there stiff, praying to god that her baby might not be lost? I think about these things sometimes when my mood darkens and I feel a little off. After trauma like that you often wonder if there was greater damage.
Im not a religious person or a superstitious one either particularly. And yet, I sometimes wonder if in those twenty seconds, while the doctors pounded at my chest and my mother did not breathe, if maybe the soul of that boy just lifted off away into the ether, maybe off to where all the souls of poor dead children go. And then, with that body lying there empty, the soul of another crept in, some soul lost and trying to venture back to the world of the living. Just a thought.
When I came back, I was as a baby newborn. I had to be taught to walk, to talk, so on until I began to catch up to all those other children who had been in this world as long as my body. But really, I dont think I ever quite caught up. I always feel too young, not quite comfortable in the appearance I wear.
I know that I should probably let it go and go on, but dying at the beginning of your life leaves a shadow on the soul I think. I once heard it described as being, touched by the darkness. And your parents look at you like some miracle and your siblings, especially the older ones that were there, look at you strangely. You died and came back, you forget your life, you spent a year in a hospital trying to remember what it was like to be four. I know I should let it go, but I dare say it haunts me. Nothing to be done of it, nothing but keep living.
And wouldnt it be just fitting if one day, when I die, I should meet the man who was meant to wear my skin. Meet him in the dark place beyond the velvet curtain of life, and perhaps he will welcome me and thank me for not breaking his mothers heart. Or maybe he will be bitter that I wore his way in his world as my own. And if it is my soul that was suppose to be here all along, where did it go for those twenty seconds? Where did it go that it should leave four years behind so easily?
I did it for about twenty seconds when I was only four years in this world. My little heart just gave up beating and my life went away. I was gone too long. For when they shocked me back into this world Id lost something in the retrieval. Id lost four years. I suppose I was lucky that the only brain damage I received was a total amnesia of my yet short life. So in a way, though I am twenty-five years in this world, sometimes I know that it is only twenty-one.
I sometimes try to imagine that moment when the heart monitor started wailing and the nurse called for the doctor. I try to imagine my mother and how she reacted. Did she hold her breath those whole twenty seconds? Was she standing there stiff, praying to god that her baby might not be lost? I think about these things sometimes when my mood darkens and I feel a little off. After trauma like that you often wonder if there was greater damage.
Im not a religious person or a superstitious one either particularly. And yet, I sometimes wonder if in those twenty seconds, while the doctors pounded at my chest and my mother did not breathe, if maybe the soul of that boy just lifted off away into the ether, maybe off to where all the souls of poor dead children go. And then, with that body lying there empty, the soul of another crept in, some soul lost and trying to venture back to the world of the living. Just a thought.
When I came back, I was as a baby newborn. I had to be taught to walk, to talk, so on until I began to catch up to all those other children who had been in this world as long as my body. But really, I dont think I ever quite caught up. I always feel too young, not quite comfortable in the appearance I wear.
I know that I should probably let it go and go on, but dying at the beginning of your life leaves a shadow on the soul I think. I once heard it described as being, touched by the darkness. And your parents look at you like some miracle and your siblings, especially the older ones that were there, look at you strangely. You died and came back, you forget your life, you spent a year in a hospital trying to remember what it was like to be four. I know I should let it go, but I dare say it haunts me. Nothing to be done of it, nothing but keep living.
And wouldnt it be just fitting if one day, when I die, I should meet the man who was meant to wear my skin. Meet him in the dark place beyond the velvet curtain of life, and perhaps he will welcome me and thank me for not breaking his mothers heart. Or maybe he will be bitter that I wore his way in his world as my own. And if it is my soul that was suppose to be here all along, where did it go for those twenty seconds? Where did it go that it should leave four years behind so easily?