Refraction | Part 1 | Darwin's Steroids
16) Sometimes Transitions Can Be Tough
So I am really pretty convinced that I've died and gone to hell. My own little slice of hell, as it turns out, is neither the party scene I once imagined as a young and hopeful man, nor the just plain nothing of nothingness I had recently been convinced it was goin to be. No, my hell was being ushered from one series of physical tortures to the next, with a heaping dollop of emotional instability in there. Or I'm in hel,l or I'm crazy and certainly believe, deep as I am here in my delusion, that I am in hell.
Let me tell you about my day.
I wake up and spend A LONG TIME, I think...Let's not get into it. I spend my entire life in the dark, in an indescribable dark and silence, that, well let's not get into it...and then, plastic. I taste plastic, I smell plastic. I hear a gurgling, flushing noise like an enormous toilet, the first noise I hear in an eternity, and suddenly I have to piss so bad I can taste it, and I am being sucked DOWN, but I am hanging in very uncomfortable straps that pull me UP! They want to tear me apart. One way after another to tear me apart.
And then I am naked and cold and wet. There is a reason we don't remember being born, I think. Traumatic doesn't really do it justice.
Light hits my eyes like a tacatomic, in it's first moment of fiery death, I slam them shut but still feel what I am certain must be blood flowing from beneath the lids. Sound so loud I thought it rupture my tympanic membranes and thrust me back into deafness. My skin electric peach fuzz chalk board, teeth-on-the-fork, chewing cotton shirt hypersensitive. Every breeze was a frozen gale, sending me into shivers that would unexpectedly stop, and within moments I would flush into pyrexia. My hypothalamus over-steering like a student driver. The softest touch was a vice grip, my vessels feeling as though they would burst out sideways from under the slightest pressure. Weak, unable to stand, muscle spasms wracked my body. My joints popped and cracked with the uncontrollable contracting and releasing.
Then, breakfast.
Then I am ushered away and left alone in a dark room. I feel my way to a corner, pace off three sides and make it a rectangle, about 15 meters by 5 meters, one door, one lengthwise wall solid ballistic grade glass. I have been rooms like this before, I recognize the feel, but the smell of this one is off. I begin to notice other somewhat odd things. First, I feel alright, better in fact, than I thought I would have after what my memory tells me is my recent past. Second, I can see, better and better, as time goes by. The room begins to take on a bluish tone, the glass slightly darker than the walls, which began to glow softly with pale yellow lines. Then the lights came on. Then they pumped out all the air.
So much for feeling good.
Somehow my lungs do not collapse, my eyes do not burst from my head, and my blood does not boil out of me so fast I explode. I live. I live through hell and some how I withstand it. I do the whole seizure song and dance again. When I come out of it I lay still for a moment. I hear nothing. I run a couple of quick tests, because I can clearly see I'm not breathing. And my heart is not beating. I count to forty-five. And it does not beat. And I clap. And it makes no sound. And a grimace crosses my face. And for the first time since the beginning of the war, I couldn't take any more. And I broke down.
And I cried.
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