it's already late (sidney watkins)
At your feet lays Ayrton, lifeless, halfway through life and death. They’ve just gotten him out of the car. That damned car in which he had this stupid accident. Although you rushed to come here as fast as the circuit car allowed you, now you’re standing still, looking at the happy Brazilian that was almost your son.
And you can feel how your eyes fill up with tears, damp and warm. But you block out those thoughts rapidly and land in reality with a thud when the other doctors, your colleagues, ask you what they should do; only to make sure.
You don’t even know where you get the voice or the spirits to say,
“A tracheotomy. He has to breathe.”
Satisfied, the doctors start working to open the way in his trachea, and when you’re going to kneel on the floor to help them out and you try to dodge the blood stain on the ground, the blood stain that seems impossible to have been released from Ayrton’s, your beloved Ayrton’s body, in so little time, you trip with the yellow helmet.
That yellow helmet, so feared by Ayrton Senna’s rivals.
That yellow helmet, also red now.
As some do the small surgery, others take care so Ayrton doesn’t swallow his tongue, and others cover his face; and you raise his eyelids to see his pupils to make certain of something you don’t even want to know, and it’s way too clear that he has massive brain injury, so huge that you doubt he is going to survive and even though you have lived similar situations with other drivers, that makes you want to cry, because it’s never been this way, and you want to forget about all this as if it was just a nightmare to see Ayrton walking happily down the paddock; Ayrton, who lived for and because of racing… Lived…
Sudenly, he sighs.
You’re completely agnostic, you’re sure of that. But you would have sworn you felt the spirit of the three-times-world-champion, the soul of Magic Senna, depart. The rest of the medical team continues their work diligent and efficiently; if someone has noticed the small sigh, they don’t show it for sure. And you, a world-renowned neurosurgeon, continue your job. Of course.
And as you help to carry and place his body in the helicopter, as gently but as quickly as you are capable of, you can’t help but remember him scarcely twenty-four hours earlier, when you told him not to race.
Too late. You know it.
-------♥-------
I would like to make a few notes here, to make it easier to understand, and to express my point of view as the writer.
First of all, this Sidney Watkins dude was really close to Ayrton. He did tell him not to race the day before, that they should 'go fishing'. But Ayrton claimed to have 'things over which we have no control' and he raced. Then, I don't really know if he did trip with the helmet (chances are no) but... well yeah, I had to have a helmet reference and that was just ideal!
The sigh thing is apparently true. Aww... Sidney wrote it in his memories (and I read it in the wikipedia).
This is one of my favorite writings. This paragraph is one of the extracts I'm most pleased with.
"As some do the small surgery, others take care so Ayrton doesn’t swallow his tongue, and others cover his face; and you raise his eyelids to see his pupils to make certain of something you don’t even want to know, and it’s way too clear that he has massive brain injury, so huge that you doubt he is going to survive and even though you have lived similar situations with other drivers, that makes you want to cry, because it’s never been this way, and you want to forget about all this as if it was just a nightmare to see Ayrton walking happily down the paddock; Ayrton, who lived for and because of racing… Lived…"
And I'm going to comment on it. Yup.
You can see it's all one sentence. That might be somewhat gramatically incorrect (and a pain in the neck to analyse syntactically :P ), but I did it for one reason: mess.
I don't know this guy, and most likely never will, but I can imagine that if I had to attend one of my best friends after a fatal accident, I would most likely be confused out of my mind. So that's what I tried to express there, with words. His thoughts follow each other closely linked, without any breaks. And then, it says he lived for and because of racing... and he, me, and hopefully you, oh faithful reader, will take note that he suddenly realized that lived was the wrong expression because he was no longer living. or close to anyway.
comments are love.