An Accidental Breakdown - the explanation of my obsession
Why am I so suddenly and totally obsessed with shadows? Well, the answer lies in the accident that I had this past summer. I was riding my motorized scooter (GoPed - 26.4cc) and I was starting to diagonally cross the street. All of a sudden, I heard a HONK, and I tried as fast as I could to swerve to the right side of the road. I felt something hit my left arm (it was the side-view mirror) and break off from the car. Instinctively, I squeezed my brake as hard as I could and at 25 mph I tipped up like a duck in the Charles River. The back end swung to the right and I went smack down on the pavement of the street, bouncing and tumbling and skidding several feet. Now, as I was in the air both falling from my scooter and from bouncing on the cement, I (for who knows what reason) saw my shadow moving on the street, and I stared at it for what seemed like a century, even though I am told by witnesses that it was only about five or six seconds.
I had a revelation of shadows appearing and disappearing from either the engulfing of larger bodies of darkness, or from a source of light canceling out the spot all together. Since then, I have shot out many poems regarding darkness/shadows/light. Three of them contain a certain character that I call "Mork Skygge", which means "dark shadow" in Norwegian. I have included said poems at the bottom of this post, so please feel free to read them and comment about them.
In the ambulance, the EMT's were very nice and friendly, but they were a little bit slow in my opinion. It took the EMT in the back with me (from now on I'll refer to him as Jack) three tries before he could get a successful IV running in me to draw blood. He said he was doing it so that they would not have to draw blood at the hospital, but he was wrong, they did it anyways. So when I got there, I went into the ER and was mobbed by residents (doctors from Harvard), doctors, nurses, and even a social worker (wtf?). So by then I could feel a bit of pressure in my leg/hip since I had moved around from the street to the sidewalk to the rescue bench to the ambulance to the ER bed to eh hospital bed. By this time I was in quite a bit of discomfort, and they game me some morphine to calm me down. Now a normal person should start feeling "high" after about 4 mg of morphine, yet I received 14 and I didn't feel a thing. Now I don't mean that my leg went numb and lost feeling, I mean that I did not feel change in the condition of my leg at all! After a total of 20 mg of morphine (including the 6 that I got in the ambulance) I started to feel a bit calm, and was able to answer the bombardment of questions. Were you wearing a helmet? Yes. Do you know what the date is? July tenth. Do you know what your name is? Sebastian Courtney. So then they sent me to X-Ray, where I was moved yet again onto another uncomfortable table and they had to pull on my legs to get a good shot. I got rolled onto my left side and my dad was down by my feet. When they went to put me back on the stretcher-thing, we had to lift my torso and legs at the same time, while supporting at the hip, so that it would not bend. My dad, being the medical buffoon that he is, yanked my right leg up into the air hard and I thought I was going to die it hurt so much. It was the first pain I felt at all, and I sure as hell knew what it was. Jeez, after what seemed like hours, I finally got some kind of stabilizer where they slapped a metal thing to the side of my leg and ace-wrapped it all the way up my leg and half way up my torso. Then after another seemingly long time, I think it was 2AM, I was told that I could go up to the transplant ward (Floor 10 South) since I would not have the surgery until the morning, because the surgeon did not want to operate with his people half asleep. (They didn't tell me until a week after I went home, but Dr. Kim, the Surgeon, didn't know if he could salvage the leg or not, and he might have amputated without my knowledge and I would have woken up from the anesthesia without a leg!)
Okay, so then the next morning they woke me up 4 hours after I went to sleep at 6am and rolled me down into the prep room for pre-op. I was told all of the precautions about anesthesia and the usual string. I then went into the OR and I was scared shitless. I could see all of the people standing around me and they all had the masks and hairnets on. The last time I had been in an OR was when I had surgery to remove a G-Tube. So they injected the stuff into my IV, and I started to doze, counting up to 56 (or so they say) before I passed out. I can recall some fleeting visions from during the surgery (quite scary) and I woke up one hour after the four hour surgery was completed. I woke up in post-op, and I felt surprisingly better. I was extremely tired, but I could sleep all I wanted. I was rolled back to my room on 10S and fell in and out of sleep for about two days, and for the first week I had trouble staying awake. Whenever someone visited me, I would be talking with them, and then all of a sudden they would be gone, I thought this was freaky the first few times.
Being in the hospital for almost a month, I had much time sitting in front of the window from where I could not move away on my own, so I often stared and watched the shadows of other buildings casting upon the smaller structures. I was on the tenth floor, so I could easily see the tops of the non-skyscrapers. Although I only went outside once during my medical confinement, it felt amazing when I rolled out into the maybe 20x20 ft courtyard which, although surrounded by cement walls, allowed sun light to travel down from above and create/trap warmth. In a matter of seconds I was asleep, since my room was almost always freezing cold, or blazing hot depending on if I had a fever or not. (I had one pretty much the whole time)
And now… the promised poems:
The First one, entitled "Mork Skygge"
Like a shadow in the darkness,
He lives a life of starkness,
Searching for some light to exist,
As little as a spark to subsist
For a while,
Looking for a torch,
Looking for a lantern,
Looking for a way to
Avoid all the emo banter;
Wakes up to see two bright eyes,
Realized there must be some light,
Because he can see the mirror,
Directly in front of him,
That bears his reflection, his eyes,
Miniscule orbs of pearly white,
And the tears flowing from them
As he cries
For joy of finally existing,
For joy of ever being anything at all,
Epiphanizing illumination,
Noon is past and life is brought back,
To all of the shadows that
For a moment weren't there,
So they again can shade the side
Walk with their own darkness,
And be visible,
Not lost,
And found again.
--------------------------------------------
The Second one, entitled "Sunshine"
Mork's definitely trying,
To survive without the shining of the sun,
Providing his dark shading,
Blackness it was creating,
But now it's gone and clouds are overhead,
And the only light's from lightning,
Rolling thunder, falling rain,
Bringing Mork more agonizing pain,
He's thrown into a world of shadow,
A world of black, a world of skygge,
So when will Mr. Sunshine return,
To let our darkness live and not be hidden.
-------------------------------------------------
The Third one, entitled "A Fading Shadow"
Mork Skygge is dying,
The sun is no more rising,
Fading into the shadow of the darkness,
Where there is no more light,
A tall tree casts light,
Where is used to cast black,
And now Mork is lost,
Lost and cannot find his way back.
--------------------------------------------------------------
The Fourth (and final) entitled "Albino Pine"
Once upon a watch, on the eve of Christmas day,
A different path was taken, not a road and not a way,
Running down a choice covered by the shadow of a tree,
Providing shade from the sun which shines so brightly… on the snow.
The New Year reigns in, covered in darkness,
Drowning in shadows, lacking any light,
The journey has now passed, for anti-illumination,
There is no longer and distinction between night and day.
Then on Christmas Day, boxes appear under pine,
And several books of genre, bound tight in black and twine,
Sent from an admirer, admiring simple life,
The favorite one opened, a mahogany fife… playing sorrowful wind,
The New Year reigns in, covered in darkness,
Drowning in the shadows of no light,
The journey long since passed, for anti-illumination,
There is no longer distinction between night and day.
I had a revelation of shadows appearing and disappearing from either the engulfing of larger bodies of darkness, or from a source of light canceling out the spot all together. Since then, I have shot out many poems regarding darkness/shadows/light. Three of them contain a certain character that I call "Mork Skygge", which means "dark shadow" in Norwegian. I have included said poems at the bottom of this post, so please feel free to read them and comment about them.
In the ambulance, the EMT's were very nice and friendly, but they were a little bit slow in my opinion. It took the EMT in the back with me (from now on I'll refer to him as Jack) three tries before he could get a successful IV running in me to draw blood. He said he was doing it so that they would not have to draw blood at the hospital, but he was wrong, they did it anyways. So when I got there, I went into the ER and was mobbed by residents (doctors from Harvard), doctors, nurses, and even a social worker (wtf?). So by then I could feel a bit of pressure in my leg/hip since I had moved around from the street to the sidewalk to the rescue bench to the ambulance to the ER bed to eh hospital bed. By this time I was in quite a bit of discomfort, and they game me some morphine to calm me down. Now a normal person should start feeling "high" after about 4 mg of morphine, yet I received 14 and I didn't feel a thing. Now I don't mean that my leg went numb and lost feeling, I mean that I did not feel change in the condition of my leg at all! After a total of 20 mg of morphine (including the 6 that I got in the ambulance) I started to feel a bit calm, and was able to answer the bombardment of questions. Were you wearing a helmet? Yes. Do you know what the date is? July tenth. Do you know what your name is? Sebastian Courtney. So then they sent me to X-Ray, where I was moved yet again onto another uncomfortable table and they had to pull on my legs to get a good shot. I got rolled onto my left side and my dad was down by my feet. When they went to put me back on the stretcher-thing, we had to lift my torso and legs at the same time, while supporting at the hip, so that it would not bend. My dad, being the medical buffoon that he is, yanked my right leg up into the air hard and I thought I was going to die it hurt so much. It was the first pain I felt at all, and I sure as hell knew what it was. Jeez, after what seemed like hours, I finally got some kind of stabilizer where they slapped a metal thing to the side of my leg and ace-wrapped it all the way up my leg and half way up my torso. Then after another seemingly long time, I think it was 2AM, I was told that I could go up to the transplant ward (Floor 10 South) since I would not have the surgery until the morning, because the surgeon did not want to operate with his people half asleep. (They didn't tell me until a week after I went home, but Dr. Kim, the Surgeon, didn't know if he could salvage the leg or not, and he might have amputated without my knowledge and I would have woken up from the anesthesia without a leg!)
Okay, so then the next morning they woke me up 4 hours after I went to sleep at 6am and rolled me down into the prep room for pre-op. I was told all of the precautions about anesthesia and the usual string. I then went into the OR and I was scared shitless. I could see all of the people standing around me and they all had the masks and hairnets on. The last time I had been in an OR was when I had surgery to remove a G-Tube. So they injected the stuff into my IV, and I started to doze, counting up to 56 (or so they say) before I passed out. I can recall some fleeting visions from during the surgery (quite scary) and I woke up one hour after the four hour surgery was completed. I woke up in post-op, and I felt surprisingly better. I was extremely tired, but I could sleep all I wanted. I was rolled back to my room on 10S and fell in and out of sleep for about two days, and for the first week I had trouble staying awake. Whenever someone visited me, I would be talking with them, and then all of a sudden they would be gone, I thought this was freaky the first few times.
Being in the hospital for almost a month, I had much time sitting in front of the window from where I could not move away on my own, so I often stared and watched the shadows of other buildings casting upon the smaller structures. I was on the tenth floor, so I could easily see the tops of the non-skyscrapers. Although I only went outside once during my medical confinement, it felt amazing when I rolled out into the maybe 20x20 ft courtyard which, although surrounded by cement walls, allowed sun light to travel down from above and create/trap warmth. In a matter of seconds I was asleep, since my room was almost always freezing cold, or blazing hot depending on if I had a fever or not. (I had one pretty much the whole time)
And now… the promised poems:
The First one, entitled "Mork Skygge"
Like a shadow in the darkness,
He lives a life of starkness,
Searching for some light to exist,
As little as a spark to subsist
For a while,
Looking for a torch,
Looking for a lantern,
Looking for a way to
Avoid all the emo banter;
Wakes up to see two bright eyes,
Realized there must be some light,
Because he can see the mirror,
Directly in front of him,
That bears his reflection, his eyes,
Miniscule orbs of pearly white,
And the tears flowing from them
As he cries
For joy of finally existing,
For joy of ever being anything at all,
Epiphanizing illumination,
Noon is past and life is brought back,
To all of the shadows that
For a moment weren't there,
So they again can shade the side
Walk with their own darkness,
And be visible,
Not lost,
And found again.
--------------------------------------------
The Second one, entitled "Sunshine"
Mork's definitely trying,
To survive without the shining of the sun,
Providing his dark shading,
Blackness it was creating,
But now it's gone and clouds are overhead,
And the only light's from lightning,
Rolling thunder, falling rain,
Bringing Mork more agonizing pain,
He's thrown into a world of shadow,
A world of black, a world of skygge,
So when will Mr. Sunshine return,
To let our darkness live and not be hidden.
-------------------------------------------------
The Third one, entitled "A Fading Shadow"
Mork Skygge is dying,
The sun is no more rising,
Fading into the shadow of the darkness,
Where there is no more light,
A tall tree casts light,
Where is used to cast black,
And now Mork is lost,
Lost and cannot find his way back.
--------------------------------------------------------------
The Fourth (and final) entitled "Albino Pine"
Once upon a watch, on the eve of Christmas day,
A different path was taken, not a road and not a way,
Running down a choice covered by the shadow of a tree,
Providing shade from the sun which shines so brightly… on the snow.
The New Year reigns in, covered in darkness,
Drowning in shadows, lacking any light,
The journey has now passed, for anti-illumination,
There is no longer and distinction between night and day.
Then on Christmas Day, boxes appear under pine,
And several books of genre, bound tight in black and twine,
Sent from an admirer, admiring simple life,
The favorite one opened, a mahogany fife… playing sorrowful wind,
The New Year reigns in, covered in darkness,
Drowning in the shadows of no light,
The journey long since passed, for anti-illumination,
There is no longer distinction between night and day.