Undone: My Path Home

Prologue

                Blackness surrounded the inside of my eyelids as I tried to figure out how to open them. I could hear a steady beeping and echoed footsteps coming from a short distance away, but as soon as the steps sounded close enough to reach me, I’d hear a quickened sneaker screech and then the sound would grow farther away. There was a strong odor of sterile alcohol or some cleaning product that rushed in as I took my first long and choked conscious breath. I felt the burn of the breath come through my nose as it filled my lungs, causing my chest to expand and then cave. I tried to move my head after that, but I couldn’t lift it. It seemed as though the heaviest of boulders was seated at the nape of my spine, paralyzing me in place, nipping any movement of my head. The defeat in struggle of my attempt left me feeling helpless as a wave of panic flushed over me. My eyes were still shut as if knocked out of unison with my brain’s direction, while all my other senses seemed involuntarily heightened. I felt my brows furrow in revelation of my failure at this curious moment in waking. The wonder of its meaning was placed on the back burner as I grew more aware of this beeping that was noisily increasing with momentum, deafening the sounds of the world around me with each passing second.

                I rapidly began taking in ragged and shallow breath after breath as a necessary demand of my brain functioning in recent consciousness, as if it were forcefully suspended by an unknown source in a time period during my sleep. Only then did I start to feel my entire body’s engulfment in pain and have a vivid directory of it actually coursing through my veins while it trekked from one spot to the next. As if I could touch my skin and trace with my finger the path it traveled. From there, I went to try and move my arms with the hopes of pushing myself upward in thrust, as I always had from that position on my back, but it was useless. Somehow they were confined to where I lay. I felt a burning itch then begin at each of my forearms and tried to bend my hand up to reach it. As if on cue, there was an awful prick of sharpness at the itch site, causing unfathomable discomfort, adding to the world of unfound mystery to me. Yet again, I took in the overwhelming recognition of the beeping as it quickened loudly in accord with my mind spiraling out at an incredible pace from the newfound terror and anxiety.

                Anger and agitation replaced the terror in pain and anxiety of not knowing where I was or the fact of having no recollection of anything leading up to why I was in this state and place of unknown. So I tried to move my legs, because I’d have liked to run and run in any direction as my fight or flight kicked in by pure survival instinct. But I couldn’t move my legs either. They were tied or strapped, separated from being brought together, and couldn’t be moved upward. The realization of restraint from movement was dawning. I felt completely vulnerable for what I could remember being the first time in my life. My eyes began to swell as I felt the tears instigate an itch and burn as they streamed down the sides of my cheeks and began to tickle my neck where they landed and rested. Not having mobility to remove their annoying trail across my skin only made me cry harder.

                “Should I yell for help?” I thought.

I opened my mouth just to close it again. It was distastefully dry and unfamiliar. I couldn’t feel my tongue as I tried to lick around my lips. It was like Velcro in my mouth. I tried to pull words out of my throat, but when they did come, they were unrecognizable to me. I must still have been sleeping, in a dream. This couldn’t be real. I didn’t even have any knowledge to base these circumstances upon where I was and stuck with no escape.

As I started to accept that I would be going nowhere on my own unless I woke up out of this nightmare, I heard hushed voices. My autonomic functioning was in complete uproar as my palms ferociously sweated, my heart raced at an increasing rate, and the reverberating beeper I heard continuously echoed my own heart thumping as if in rhythmic harmony. Soon following, there were footsteps clearly coming in my direction. It was intensely challenging to willfully open my eyes. They quivered blinkingly only to shut again.

                Reluctantly, by sheer will alone did my eyes finally open in shock to where I was! “Oh, how I wish I’d’ve been only dreaming!” For the room I was in was not my own or one that I recognized I should be in, and the person walking toward me was a complete stranger.

The stranger asked me, “How do you feel? Do you remember how you got here?”

                I thought to myself, “What happened to me? Oh God, what was the last thing that I did? Where was I before I ended up here?” That’s when I began to cry for my mom.

                It wasn’t until my eyes had opened that all the little factors began to click together. I was lying in a hospital room being tended to by a nurse. The white ceiling and walls threatened their closure around me as I stared out at the blackened television hanging near the bedside on a swivel, just across from the heart machine that had been openly monitoring my every erratic beat that consequently caused the nurse to arrive for my awakening.

It is said that life is symbolic to a puzzle. I agree. For I only have the beginning of this story and do not know how it will end. In this sentence, I am twenty-seven years old and living with my parents, my brother, and my four children in the home I grew up in.

The puzzle: a mere grouping of sporadic flashbacks, excerpts from a relevant acquiring of events that form a life. It is a hope to be molded and shaped into one that may be remembered at the end by others. It is also a hope that all the puzzle pieces form a picture worth looking at by the end of the journey. Along the way or at any point to touch a life, to show cause for someone else to change for the better, would be a plus, even if only one. There is no distinct angle or size I am trying to reach for myself here. Merely a testimony, my own declaration and proof, a simple truth exposed for any person to read.

I’ve read over and over to never be impressed by my own knowledge and wisdom. Doing so only makes me a fool. I agree with this also. I will open up humbly every darkened room inside my heart and mind that I can safely reach to the best of my knowledge and ability for the purpose of sharing my own testimony. Thank you for reading.