The chimes of the wooden grandfather clock ring in my swollen ears. Feet, large and small, gather around my broken body. I can’t see them, my eyes won’t open. Screams of terror along with the smell of freshly baked bread linger in the air. There shouldn’t be bread in this hospital; but perhaps this is what it’s like to finally die. You start to appreciate everything you took for granted, even if it’s just a humble loaf of bread.
It hurts. It hurts more than it should. It hurts to open my eyes. It hurts to move my head.
What is this feeling? I strain to see what is going on around me. I hear the sound of something being rolled on wheels, and feel myself being jostled from side to side. Maybe this is a roller coaster...I wonder how I got here. But there shouldn’t be bread on a roller coaster…
How did everything end up this way?
I was crying on the bus. The love of my life had just left me; I probably was never the one for them after all. I remember looking out the window on that gloomy day in London. The sullen cloudy sky reflected the way I felt in that moment; like the world understood my heartache and shared the weight of my overwhelming grief.
It was almost poetic, until I was struck by lightning.
I felt the electricity tear through my body, blood coursing through my veins. I felt powerful yet simultaneously weak. It was sweet and bitter, it froze my skin and burned it all the same. I couldn’t exactly describe the sensation, but it felt like I had been touched by Death. That’s what it felt like; Yet upon asking other passengers on the bus what they thought my brush with death looked like, they would agree that it looked like I had just realized the gas was on at home.
The tears that had poured down my face turned silver. At that moment, the elderly man sitting beside me began to slump over in his seat and the look of life began to drain from his eyes; as he fell out of his seat, I realized that he was going to die right in front of me.
I felt a rush of panic. I leaned down to see if he was breathing. The passengers around me started to crowd around us. I frantically tried to perform every CPR procedure I could rack out of my brain, yet it was useless.
The man that lay before me was utterly and tragically dead.
I looked around at the passengers surrounding myself and the man, flailing helplessly, searching for somebody, anybody, to help me. Their voices overlapped to create one large consensus.
I had killed this man.
The tears started to stream down my face once more, as all my hardships, all my problems, every insufferable aspect of my life came flooding back to fall on this man. My tears fell on the man’s heart, soaking into his shirt. The passengers around me shuffled to move, to comfort me, to call the police, to do anything except gawk at what an utter failure I am. I suddenly felt movement in the man’s legs as I was resting over them. I looked up to see he had slowly begun to regain consciousness.
That was the first time I realized my superpower. I could bring life through my pain. I helped much more than a human ever could. I made sure my life was miserable so that everyone else could live a joyful life that was worth living.
I remember being locked away in a cold cage. The cage wasn’t supposed to be uncomfortable but I made sure I was. I remember forcing myself to stay in a perpetual state of sadness; if I were ever to feel any other emotion I was not to be fed for the day. I remember the lies I made them tell me.
“No one loves you”
“No one cares about you”
I remember the public blaming the government for letting me do this, but they didn’t know I begged for it. This was necessary. So I kept crying, believing that my suffering would be worth it.
It never was.
I could hear the noise of the television in my tiny cell. I could hear the screams of pain in the streets of my home. I was supposed to be the child of Omelas; yet my misery had amounted to nothing.
That’s why I’m on this stretcher, in this hospital. I am here because I couldn’t cry enough to fix the world. I couldn’t do it alone. I needed help. I realized it takes a change that can only be enacted inside the hearts of every person on this planet. The tears I cried were to take on the suffering of many, but those tears did not cure. They only temporarily fix. It takes everyone to cry in unison; then and only then can we cry the tears of life.
Published August 17, 2021
Written by Abinaya Balaji ~ Edited by Sarah Wilenzick
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