Deafening Silence
Prompt: {You were involved in a terrible car accident and have been in a coma for the past three months. What your family and the doctors don’t know is that you can hear everything that they say. Write the scene.}
Every second felt like a dream. One of those that feel so real you ask yourself if this is actually reality…But then you wake up to the world once more. It was a dream.
What do you do when the dream turns into a nightmare? One which you are involuntarily bound to, never being able to open your eyes?
You don’t do anything.
It just keeps going like a bad joke that never gets to the damn punchline…
1 year ago…
“It seems the trauma was more severe than we thought. We don’t know when he’ll wake up or if he even will in the first place. I am deeply sorry.” The doctor said in a very doctor-like way.
“No no… Is there nothing you can do?” that was my mother.
I could almost hear her shaking. It was almost unbearable to listen to the mortified tears of my family. They thought I was gone and, for the most part, I was. For the next couple of weeks my room would be filled with people. Most of them crying. However, some days were good. They joked around, talked about their lives. They were more united than usual. At least this bad thing created a good thing.
This didn’t last very long.
6 months ago…
“Mom, how many times do we have to keep visiting Luke? Isn’t he dead?”
“Not for long son. And he isn’t dead he’s just taking a very long nap.
Us adults will decide what to do about your uncle.”
At first, hearing what was going on was a sort of relief and gave me hope. Maybe it meant that I had a chance of waking up, I thought. Then it started feeling more like a curse someone bestowed upon like some sort of joke. I didn’t have much notion of time in the state I was in. And I also was not conscious all the time. There were periods of darkness as I call it. Fitting, as it was all I “saw”. When I was lucid I overheard my parents saying how it has been a year already and that they had to make a decision even if it was difficult to bear the weight of such judgement. Not much to analyze here, they were talking about whether they should kill me, essentially.
To them I was dead already anyways.
And do I really care if they do decide to cut the cord?
I was terrified of being submerged into a never-ending darkness. A big realm of nothingness. Oblivion. The idea petrified every bone in me… Or at least it did.
I expected a decision to be made soon thereafter…
Yet here I am alive.
I had no idea how long it’s been since I heard them talking. Nobody comes to visit anymore. “They probably have a lot on their plate” I had taught myself to believe.
The silence was easy on the ears but heavy on the mind.
It was relaxing.
And relentless.
It had no mercy. It pierced deep into my core, picking at the right notes to make me cringe, shiver, wither away in the loneliness of being in-between life and death.
The silence never stopped.
Make it stop.
Please…
Indefinite time after…
“How could they leave me here by myself?”
Left alone in a ship with no sail.
Drifting between two opposite currents canceling each other out as they branch out into the light or the dark.
Darkness doesn't seem that bad anymore...