just a random picture from my hard drive, I don't know the origin

A Taste of Non-Existence

So this is it?

I was surrounded. The left side of my face was paralyzed, and my limbs started moving on their own. Strange little loops, like I was drawing invisible lines and shapes in the air. Most of my vocabulary was gone, and I would slur the few words my failing brain had left. I managed to turn my head and asked one of the nurses for my dad. I held his hand while feeling like I was disintegrating. Whatever I thought I was—my story, my ideas and opinions, the people I knew—it all just slipped away. The last thing I remember was someone turning me over, and a little woman wearing leather Dunlop shoes jamming a needle up my back. And then, as Gandalf would put it: Darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time...

I suppose it wasn't quite like the rest of the Gandalf quote, each day being as long as a life age of the earth and all that, but it wasn't the end for me either. I woke up and felt like my head was going to explode, but I was me again. When I opened my crusty eyes, I got startled by a young neurologist sitting beside my bed. He was looking at me with slightly hostile curiosity, like some sort of Twin Peaks-adjacent cousin of Bob watching me sleep. He was very big and very blond. The kind of guy who'd power walk across hospital floors, large and in charge, aggressively chewing gum and doing his thing. Here and there, you could hear him muse about nurses he'd like to fornicate with, other gossip, or what "they" should do if so and so dies. Like the guy in the neighboring room, who kept howling in pain.

The moment was rather awkward until the doctor broke the silence. Apparently, there was an unusually high amount of white blood cells in my spinal fluid, indirectly indicating some kind of infection. Long story short, they decided to throw the kitchen sink at me. Either way, I was going to stay a while. Blondie then changed topics and started rambling about his dream of becoming a nutritionist and how neurology was just a way to make ends meet. I squinted at him, feeling like I had seen him before somewhere. I vaguely remembered a local TV report about some strange MD in shoulder pads explaining his love for American football. The stuff where players use their heads as battering rams and give each other brain damage. He kept talking, and frankly, I only understood half of what he was saying and felt a little brain damaged myself. So I nodded in compliance until he got up and left for greener pastures. I started pondering my own life decisions.

Life

It's strange—we take everything for granted until we lose it. You have it, and then you don't. Nothing lasts forever, you know? I closed my eyes and listened to the symphony of the night. A gentle summer breeze was blowing across the giant balcony, carrying all sorts of distant sounds and noises. Somewhere, a muffled radio played a melancholic rock song. In the distance, a door fell shut, hydraulics hissed, a gust of concentrated air whooshed, steps clicked and bounced, a scream. I turned around and looked up. The scream came from the floor above the neurology ward, where the hospital housed the clinically insane. Their windows were covered with what looked like giant cheese graters made from sheet metal. Some kind of suicide prevention thing, I assumed.

For a moment, it was like I was one of them, and I felt a burst of bittersweet sadness. This was it. The garbage can. A hint of how bad things could get. Humans reduced to their malfunctions, being funneled through the gears of an uncaring machine. Hyperbole, I guess, but I kept thinking about the kind people trapped in bad situations like that, until it becomes their new normality. After I was released, I went online and read a few of the hospital reviews. One guy argued he was institutionalized after threatening a formal complaint against one of the doctors. The kind of stuff where they tie you down to a bed to "protect" you from yourself. Technically some kind of torture, I'm sure.

I kept having issues for a couple of years. Sudden jolts, bursts of electricity shooting through my body, often accompanied by a feeling of impending doom and other sensations that are hard to articulate. One way I tried to explain it once was experiencing movement in stillness. Like your brain is ice skating into another spatial dimension. Or like when you walk for a couple of hours looking at the ground and feel like you're still moving when you stop. I tried explaining this to a general practitioner once and must've sounded absolutely insane. A notion I eventually started believing myself, thinking it was only a matter of time until I saw the cheese grater windows from the inside. Positively psychosomatic, for sure. At least, that was the feeling I was getting from healthcare professionals.

Ironically enough, it all ended after a trip to the dentist. One of my teeth was acting up. Looking at the swelling of that part of my gums, she concluded it was some kind of infection. Actually, I must've had it for a while, and she argued parts of my jawbone had already begun dissolving. A bad crown on a dead tooth—that was it. She pulled the thing, and it all went away. Was it related to my health issues? Maybe, who knows. But back in the hospital, they didn't even look into my mouth, I think. Just one of those mysteries.

Stories

I wanted to write about the hospital for a while, but I never could make it work. As a whole, there's enough material there to make up some kind of narrative. Some of the little occurrences seem so weird many people might think I was making them up anyhow. Like one of the nurses being my first "girlfriend" from back in the day. A two-week-long fling with a cousin of a friend, who just had become a nurse at that very same neurology ward. I think she knew as well, but we both went on pretending like we didn't. Or at least I did. One of the things I actually remember about her was her claiming to be a witch and how that "stuff" really worked. Later, she'd end up marrying some kind of disco jabroni. Go figure, but I find the idea of running into a former lover and treating them like a stranger interesting.

It's the little things. Like one of the nurses calling me a spastic and my dad claiming she was secretly into me. The scars on another nurse's forearms. An old man mean-mugging me while cowboy-walking an infusion rack across the balcony. Another old man begging visitors for a glass of water. Or the Christian layman trying to convert patients and then gossiping about them in the next room, complaining about a young Muslim praying in his bathroom. Then there was that bunk mate who was claiming to be a former Polish marine commando and how he didn't have shoes when growing up and working in Danzig. German intelligence kept hounding him for some Soviet secrets, but he just wouldn't cooperate. Or so he said. He also talked about receiving dance classes in order to blend in more effectively as a saboteur. Classy! Another bunky was an Albanian who claimed to have been some hero in the Kosovo War. Don't believe him? Just go to Albania and ask about Alban; they'll know who you're talking about. He wasn't a bad guy, but I think he went to jail at one point, but I didn't press him on it.

Maybe none of this is really that interesting, but I feel like someone competent could turn it into something. For now, it's one of those things I told myself to write about one of these days. I like the idea of telling it from the perspective of a father, but who knows.