Random Freewrite 1, Week of 1/17/11 (late): Prose 1

There is some elasticity to the brain, and I can’t ever seem to record the stretching, only the snap that brings me back. Isolated moments I relive wishing my future held something of my past. There’s guilt and there’s loss, and those who counsel honestly say it never grows easier, only more familiar.

There in the tiny hospital room of some years past, my great aunt took a breath and let it out so slowly, so completely, that I had thought for a moment that she wouldn’t take another. I had sat there silently, watching her, and these things grow on us less sluggishly than doctors might suggest. I knew it then. We were essentially alone. Her roommate hadn’t the awareness to be mindful of us, and my parents were in the hallway, discussing my great aunt with her doctor. I can still sense their nearness. I can hear their voices dimly. I recall myself sitting there frozen. Do I tell them or do I wait? What snaps me to is what came almost an hour later. My mother’s words, as if she knew, telling my father and I, “I don’t want to die like this.”

My mother isn’t dead. She’s here, in this ashen memory, and she’s here, in frightening dreams. She’s bent over a counter we never owned in a room I don’t recognize, struggling to breathe and to speak, and her face is twisted and grey and hollowed out like the ghouls they show to scare us on television, and I’m entering the room coming from somewhere unimportant to find her like that. Her face is exaggerated, a horror beyond recognition, and I can’t find my voice for the shock of it. Somehow I hold her and I struggle for my phone and she’s saying something I can’t hear anymore, something gurgled and wrong, and she can’t stand at all. She’s leaning. I can’t let her fall. The ambulance will never arrive in time. “I don’t want to die like this,” she had said. She told us years ago, as if she knew.

Where does the horror come from?

Some nights I don’t sleep at all.