Heavy
Heavy
‘It’s not just an adjective. It’s a state of mind.’ He thought to himself pulling with his arms to sit up in bed, pausing for a moments rest at that critical point the apogee of the whole exercise. When he needed to let go with his arms and turn them round to push himself away from the mattress.
He hates being told to ‘take it easy’. Since waking from the accident, an accident that he can’t remember and not one person will tell him about. His doctors, he has three all talk dispassionately about his miraculous recovery. His friends and family well some weep some joke but they are shadows he only half remembers. If someone came to visit the wrong bed he wouldn’t be able to tell them.
Once he’s pushed himself all the way up right he can swing his legs over the edge of the bed, where they dangle like a child’s an inch off the floor, pale and stick thin. From here exhausted he watches the sky out the window. He’ll marvel at the bustle of clouds racing past, the frenetic dashes of the pigeons that live on the Hospital roof are ridiculously exuberant.
He can’t see any other buildings, or even roofs. Just sky. ‘Next week’ he tells himself, ‘next week I’ll walk over to the window an look down. Six or seven steps no more.’ He knows today, under the assault of gravity, his withered wasted body will not make it, not even that far, not yet.
There is a cheerful physiotherapist always smiling great big white white teeth and coffee dark skin that shimmers faintly under the anaemic light of the ward. He comes twice a day and moves limbs and works joints that can not work them selves, not yet. He’s the only one that is happy when he finds him sitting staring out the windows. Nurses bustle and ‘help’ him lie down, can it be help if you don’t want to do it? Questions come to the mind in times like this - the enforced idleness.
Heavy he thinks, heavy is a state of mind, as the weight of the medicines and exhaustion push him back under into a dreamless sleep. Where the pitiful shell he lives in is strong. Strong enough to be free of the shackles that - in the waking world - bind him a slave to the care of others.
‘It’s not just an adjective. It’s a state of mind.’ He thought to himself pulling with his arms to sit up in bed, pausing for a moments rest at that critical point the apogee of the whole exercise. When he needed to let go with his arms and turn them round to push himself away from the mattress.
He hates being told to ‘take it easy’. Since waking from the accident, an accident that he can’t remember and not one person will tell him about. His doctors, he has three all talk dispassionately about his miraculous recovery. His friends and family well some weep some joke but they are shadows he only half remembers. If someone came to visit the wrong bed he wouldn’t be able to tell them.
Once he’s pushed himself all the way up right he can swing his legs over the edge of the bed, where they dangle like a child’s an inch off the floor, pale and stick thin. From here exhausted he watches the sky out the window. He’ll marvel at the bustle of clouds racing past, the frenetic dashes of the pigeons that live on the Hospital roof are ridiculously exuberant.
He can’t see any other buildings, or even roofs. Just sky. ‘Next week’ he tells himself, ‘next week I’ll walk over to the window an look down. Six or seven steps no more.’ He knows today, under the assault of gravity, his withered wasted body will not make it, not even that far, not yet.
There is a cheerful physiotherapist always smiling great big white white teeth and coffee dark skin that shimmers faintly under the anaemic light of the ward. He comes twice a day and moves limbs and works joints that can not work them selves, not yet. He’s the only one that is happy when he finds him sitting staring out the windows. Nurses bustle and ‘help’ him lie down, can it be help if you don’t want to do it? Questions come to the mind in times like this - the enforced idleness.
Heavy he thinks, heavy is a state of mind, as the weight of the medicines and exhaustion push him back under into a dreamless sleep. Where the pitiful shell he lives in is strong. Strong enough to be free of the shackles that - in the waking world - bind him a slave to the care of others.