What’s the best part to start a story, the beginning, the middle or the end? I never thought I’d ever need the answer to that question, maybe if I had, it would have been what easy writing all of this down. But I guess it all doesn’t matter.
In the end, nothing ever does.
The Doctors say the tumor in my brain has taken over, I have only a couple of hours left to live. I am not sad, I guess I’m lucky in a way, at least I know when it all ends.
So, this isn’t the fable you tell your kids as you rock them to bed at night, neither is it one told with the skills of a word smith. It isn’t one re-cycled from the words of a dying boy, or that’s exactly what it’s going to be, and that’s why you should pay attention.
News travel fast, but never does it arrive its destination in the manner in which it left. It would be twisted and tweaked until it bears a skeletal resemblance to what it once was.
That’s the history of rumours. Before this gets to you, and whatever part you might choose to believe is your choice, but I have done my part. I have told my truth, it’s left to you to decipher which part is.
My mom peeks in through the curtains again, she thinks I can’t see her, she’s holding her breath… afraid to make a sound, but she doesn’t need to.
I turn to the doorway, my eyes slightly open, “Mom, come in.”
She falters for a few seconds, pondering my invitation. “Sorry darling, I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“I wasn’t sleeping mom.” She sighs ever so lightly as she steps in, and I adjust on my bed to make room for her to sit. “Have you been crying?” her swollen eyelids are telltale signs that she has, and the reason isn’t far-fetched. But that’s the only thing I can think up for conversation starters. Mom’s isn’t going to say a word if I don’t. She’s too broken to, and she feels she would make me weaker by talking. The glass sheen appear again as a film of unshed tears form, the veins around her temple become more pronounced and her lower lip quivers. I reach out for her hands folded atop her laps and place mine over them. “Mom, I’m still here.”
It doesn’t help, and I realize it doesn’t. It only reminds them of how soon I’d leave. The tears are dropping now, transparent wetness, leaving a trail on her ebony black skin. I reach out for them. “Mom don’t cry.” She does exactly the opposite. Her wails are muffled by the cupped palms which is immediately placed over them. It hurts me when I stand, and so I sit up, enduring the jolt of pain that shoots down my entire body. I inch closer to her, and run my hand over her arm.
“I’m being silly,” she laughs between tears, in that drained pitch that you can swear comes from a breaking heart. “I should be the one comforting you, not the other way around.” She bites her lips, and straightens up. “What would you like to have for supper?”
I’m not hungry, but it would keep her occupied, forestall her tears, it might as well serve the both of us.
“My favourite.” That makes her smile. She stares at me, tracing my face with her slender fingers. She turns away abruptly, making hastened steps towards the door. The sobs are out, before the door meets the frame.
This is the only part of leaving I don’t like. Then pain you’d cause to the people you’d be leaving behind.
My life changed the night I met him. Not in the pivotal sense, or the revolutional upheaval, and re-directioning. My destiny changed. I felt it, right from when I saw him, really saw him.
I was going to end it…I was ending it, right there and then. I was tired of everything, but when those deep blue eyes stared deep into my soul and asked the one thing that could keep me living, I had replied the two words that would change my life forever; to fly.
So now, I don’t think I made a mistake, I don’t think it’s the wrong choices I made that got me to where I am. I know it’s the right choices that did. Somethings are just meant to happen.
When I think back to that night, it’s gravity that keeps me grounded. Will power curbs the incontrollable desire, to do it, again.
The whole house has been grave quiet since morning, and if it weren’t for this pounding headache, I would be on my feet trying to cheer them up. I’m only dying, it’s not like the world is coming to an end.
Okay, maybe that’s me being exaggeratedly cheerful.
It hurts, leaving all of them hurts, but it’s not like there’s any amount of tears than can keep me.
It’s funny how when you want something it doesn’t seem to want you, but when you turn your back on it. Whamp, it grabs your ankle, holding and pulling.
But as for regrets, nah, I don’t think I have any, for all the good it does, I think it would have ended long ago before now, and nothing short of disastrous.
When I think back, I think back to the night I saw him. He saved me, saved me from myself.
But that wasn’t the first time. You know the feeling; like a memory from the past, a déjà vu experience, a call back of a thought long forgotten.
I knew him from the beginning of me.
A beginning I couldn’t even remember, until he showed me.
The first time we met, He gave me his hands. And reluctantly I took it. But little did I know that I had given more than I thought I had, I had given a part of me. A part of me he would use as a compass to find me years later. When I thought I had been drained of everything thing else, he returned the other, and together we made it whole again. More whole than it had ever been.
He was the most perfect being I ever saw, I thought he was my guardian angel. There was no halo, no bright light shadowing him, no great white feathers, just him.
Androgynously beautiful, and inhumanly perfect. But he didn’t tell me anything, just stared at me with the saddest eyes I have ever seen. It pierces my heart when I think back to it. He was cloaked in black, his pale skin covered, but the stars were reflected in his eyes, he looked at the pills in my hands, and like I never even knew I had control of them, they all fell out.
The skies were dark, and the crescent moon was hiding beneath the clouds, and he was in my room, communicating words to me that shattered by soul. His lips never even moving.
And then he stretched out his hand, and smiled. His eyes smiled with him, wrinkling at their edges, making him look both young and old at the same time.
And that was when I woke up.
The next morning, everything seemed normal, the chirping birds, annoyingly perching on the glass window, the curtain were pulled back letting in the glory of the morning sunrays. The pills were scattered on the floor, and I had the biggest smile plastered on my face.
I had met an angel.
I scrambled out of bed, either to break the news to my mom, and sisters. When I stepped on it. It was a piece of paper, with edges different from the area. It had three words inscribed on it, always with you.
But when next I looked, my palms were empty. I had a million questions I wanted to ask, but who would believe me?
So I wrote them all down, waiting for him again. I knew he would be back, I had never been convicted in my life of anything as I was of that.
Suddenly life didn’t seem so bad anymore. School I dreaded before, was something I was looking forward to getting over and done with. I couldn’t wait for the day to be over. I couldn’t wait to close my eyes.
Nothing seemed to matter, not the fact I was ridiculed in school for a crime I didn’t commit, not the news I had discovered of my real paternity.
I was at peace, I couldn’t remember exactly everything that happened, but I knew something had changed. I clutched the inscription to my chest and whispered. I felt a tickling sensation, and I knew I wasn’t going crazy, he could.
The first night he came, he held my hands. And the second time,
He thought me to fly.
But I didn’t remember much of it, any for it.
Each night was an adventure.
But I wasn’t supposed to remember it the following morning, the feelings stayed with me, the bliss, so that I smelled clouds and tasted dews of heaven each time I swallowed…my days lit, filled with strength to go through. My senses alert to the beauties around me.
I appreciated the greenness of leaves, and the blueness of seas. I couldn’t fault people as much as I usually did, because I was learning to looks past their lips, and into the eyes; the only part that mirrored their soul.
Each day, I grew more to acknowledge life, and take each day as a gift. Maybe they saw the aura on radiating, I was letting go of everything, the anger, the hate…
When mom and dad broke the news to me that I was adopted (even though I was already aware), all I felt was gratefulness, I wasn’t bitter that all my life had been a lie, I didn’t feel scorned to thinking they had deceived me, I didn’t grieve over being unwanted by my biological parents. I was grateful that I had them, and I let them know. Mom stared at me like she would a piece of talking wood. She was awed. And I don’t blame her.
The disturbed me of the past months would have thrown a fit, and broken every glass ware in the house. I would have smashed through the glass panes, and poured out the wrath of my pain, hauling insults at them.
But I was glad they picked me up, I wouldn’t have chosen better parents. And they, confiding that to me brought me closer to them than I had ever been.
Every one noticed my metamorphosis. I had a wonderful secret to attribute it too, but I couldn’t understand it myself.
I knew, but that was as far as it was supposed to go.
Trouble started when I began to understand.
I knew special things happened, and that was the plan, to lead me through life, and not interfere with life itself. The supernatural was never met to cross with the natural.
But it did.
Everything changed the morning I woke up with a brief recollection of the night before.
The swirling blue lights, and the melodic sounds that filled my room. My ceiling was a twirl, it was a vortex…it was all coming from the vortex.
I had crossed REM too quickly, my eyes flew open, and I felt something make a grab for me or my memory because the next few seconds, I saw black, and as I tried to get up, a pang of pain shot from my temple.
I felt instantly dizzy, and I swooned.
That night, I remembered everything.
It was just after midnight, and I was waiting. Staring into the darkness. And there it was, the image from the morning, manifesting. The sounds came first, slow, and room began to turn, faster and faster and faster, till the walls gave in and dissipated to air, I looked up, and sure there it was; the vortex, and as I looked down, I met him staring.
“You look worried,” his voice was soft, “What happened this morning?”
I tried to smile, but my heart beat gave me away. “I never remember the next morning.”
He smiled like that’s what I was expected to say.
“No, you don’t.” He says it matter-of-factly.
The words I speak sound so rehearsed, I feel I have said them a thousand times. “Why? I want to.”
And instantly, I knew the next part. It was like living in your favorite play. I was an actor in my own dreams.
I got up and followed him, out. Not out of the room, out to the skies. We were walking on clouds. My room had become an opening, suspended in the heavens. And I stood by his side, my heart, beating in tandem to still-sounding melodies, and his voice appearing to come from my own head.
We communicated with thoughts, words were too medieval in the gloriousness we were suddenly thrust into.
We walked on an invisible road, hands dancing through clouds, and my heart threatening to burst from the beauty that surrounded us. “Are we in heaven?” I asked.
And then he turned to me. I heard the words beneath his smile.
The heaven you created
I felt it, an overwhelming strength. I could feel the liquids coursing through my veins, but that wasn’t the only thing. And then I closed my eyes. It was a dream in a dream. I thought up images, and their materialized, just a thought, and pop.
Soon I was levitating, higher and higher and higher. He, always by my side.
I wasn’t supposed to remember.
But I did.
And then the headaches started. And the visions followed. I knew I had crossed a line, I knew it before the last night he spoke to me. I knew it as I stared into his sky lit iris. I saw the sadness boldly written on his face, I knew I was going to die.
I'd tell you who he is though, he is the Dream catcher. And yes, he is an angel, not the one you know of. He is of a different kind, the ones bound to live eternity in severance of a grave mistake, but that's not my story to tell.
…To Be Continued.