Last Day

I woke up feeling somewhat bewildered yet entranced. My mind seemed unable to focus. How to describe this feeling? Pain? Confusion? A hangover? No, something more, something substantial, something altered. My previous night’s activities were much alike to any other night, I would return home from my daily activities, go to my bar, return home again and sleep. All of which occurred, yet a feeling of such indescribability grips me like a loathsome leech, a foul feeling, like I have done something wretched. This is perplexing, it cannot be a dream, dreams don’t affect me, I simply don’t believe in them. This peculiar feeling plagues me like some New York cockroach that won’t go away. Normally I would not talk of such sentiment but customarily I am more than in control of my mind and body. However, this morning I am rendered vacant, yet searching. Good lord, why today? My mind knows I have a big trial today, how dare it haunt me with such asinine notions? This better pass, soon.

As I enter the courtroom my head is filled with a strange sense of ambiguity that
leaves me somewhat paralysed.

“Mr. Remington could you please confirm your name and address for the courtroom please”

...Billy, erm... William Christopher Remington”

The wood in a courtroom is like something I have never seen nor felt but yet it has more feeling than any other wood I have ever encountered. How can something so lived in, so old and so tattered feel so sterile? The seat in which I sit has been residence to murderers, rapists, child abusers, fraudsters and even lawyers, yet I feel more culpable than any of them. As the lawyers speak their calculated and meaningless gibberish I sit alone in a room full of tens of people. The smell is almost as prominent as the feeling, perhaps it’s the sweat of guilty men, perhaps it’s the smell of justice or simply it’s the smell of fear. Either way it’s making me nauseous beyond belief. Everything is tainted, It would appear my life means nothing today, my life is the manufactured and purpose built wood upon which I sit. Judge Cower, Judge Cower is the judge judging me today. Why is judge Cower worthy of judging me? Is Judge Cower so Judge free that she has the autonomy to be able to Judge me freely? What’s the separation? Are we all not rats upon a sinking ship, each one of us avoiding the inevitable plunge? It would appear today I am the rat, and my boggled mind the sinking ship.

Of course I do not swear upon the bible, that book needs no more lies placed on top of it. How can such a thing be holy when thousands of lies are placed upon it daily? Lies upon lies. The bible doesn’t need mine; I’ll save that for someone who thinks it means something. My eyes meet the eyes of the jury, each glance is greeted with a sickening wince, but from which side I cannot tell. My mind too boggled and warped to grasp. What is this perpetual sensation? Words are spoken from men in suits, they ruffle their papers, they sip their water, and they earn their money. Normally when in court I sit and rate the women on the jury, I number them out of ten or I put them into categories of ‘fuck-able’, ‘maybes’ ‘Only if I was desperate’ and ‘no chance’. Today I cannot even bring myself to think with my dick because my disconsolate mind won’t let me rest. I feel like my mind is a bubbling cauldron, and with each bubble that pops and the faster and more furious it gets the closer I am to finding out what it all means, but it never comes. Everything means nothing.

I walk out of the courtroom completely unbeknown to what just happened, if I was able to think then I’m sure this wasn’t supposed to happen. Yet I leave the courtroom with the same disgusting and insidious feeling that I arrived with. As I step outside the squelch of blood from my shoes seems to reverberate louder than ever. The grey slabs of cold concrete judge my feet upon which they tread. The trees have faces etched into their bark, each one stares malevolently into my soul, I’m sure the clouds look down with a vengeful might but I’m too scared to look and see. A sense of paranoia grips me with a tight suffocating hold. I reach to loosen my tie, but I do not wear a tie. I undo the buttons on my shirt yet they are buttons made of corrugated iron, my throat tightens and I cannot breathe. The sky turns grey, and just as I thought; the clouds are my adjudicator. As I fall to the ground the world swirls around me, an array of greys and blacks swarm me like a twisted hallucination, never have I seen so many shades of black, each one seems to inform me of my own futile existence.

Peace at last, my brain gives me a rest. No more thoughts, no more feelings, no more existing.

I wake up and the fog has lifted. Grey becomes a lighter shade of grey, the black still ever as present, yet the hospital walls reflect its shade, leaving me in some form of light. I study the room, I am in a white room, in a white bed, with white linen, a white pillow, a white ceiling, a white floor; and then the white nurse comes and takes my black blood. Three men share my room, two of which glow an ailing yellow, their blood riddled with jaundice. The other is a man close to shaking hands with death, too weak to walk, unable to piss or to shit without the aid of a tube and a bag; the only sound he contributes comes from his ventilator, a loud shrill hiss of oxygen being pumped into his lifeless lungs. Occasionally he cries in pain, shuddering like a car engine but this only irritates me, and I take refuge under my white pillow. All I have to look at is a man opposite me; he sleeps half naked for the majority of the day, except when he takes a break to eat the plastic food. The only thing we appear to have in common is the colour of my nicotine-stained fingers, which match every inch of his body. Auditory experiences are no more pleasant than the aesthetic ones. The constant piercing sounds of machines bleeping, interwoven with men from other rooms vomiting, crying, moaning and screaming all send me into disrepair. Even watching them breathe when they are asleep makes me ill. Of course they tend not to let you sleep much in hospital, they awake me regimentally to take the pressure of my black blood, and other such things. All of which infuriate me profusely, as each time I am awoken I am forced to observe my dismal surroundings. The bleeps echo so much louder at night, as if they are warning me of something. Either that or they are taunting me.

It would appear I am ill.

I am temporarily moved to another room, to make room for someone more in need, perhaps a third yellow man to give the room a vivid glow? My time here is both precious and bloodcurdling. The time away from my cellmates is needed, however the more time I am left to contemplate the more unsettled I become. Thoughts, feelings and realisations start to come to light that I have never pondered. Meaningless, sentimental, soppy shit floods my mind like a tidal wave of demonising notions. I fight them but they still come, the water runs over my head, the swimmer within my brain not strong enough to fight the flow. That feeling, that wretched feeling that possessed me like a demon in the courtroom that day, it’s clawing its way back. Still such indescribability, but words start to surface that may cover it, I fight them, I fight them hard with everything I possess within my fragile body and mind. These words I will not accept, I know not of them, they do not know me, we have not met and we will not meet. Oh how they scorch my mind, they burn, they scold, and they blister. The water subsides and then the fires burn instead, my mind a washed with elements and words, they start to take over. REGRET, SHAME, LOSS, DISGUST. No! I must fight them, I must.

Fortunately I was only temporarily moved to this room, and so I reside back with my yellow men and my oxygen fiend, it would appear my temporary replacement was not worthy of my identical bed space, may he have a happy dwelling in another white paradise. Meanwhile I am informed that leaving my bed may endanger my health, so upon many other things I have to be fitted with a catheter, the level of degradation is immeasurable, whether it’s because it puts me on a parallel with my tube and bag neighbour or because I have a rubber tube inserted into my urethra that burns like a petrol fuelled fire I simply don’t know. Either way I am now a peer to my desolate neighbour, perhaps we can discuss techniques as to how to save face whilst urinating in ours beds and staring at a murky coloured middle-aged man?

My time here now is indefinite, I wait for the habitual doctors visit at 8-11am daily, in which they inform me of my situation that seems to never change but gets constantly more threatening as each daybreak passes. My thirst needs quenching, it’s taking over, I have no means of fulfilling my indispensable needs, and it’s only a matter of time before it takes a hold of my senses, actions and my mind. A whirlwind is predicted, of the highest order and I fear for anybody that stands in its path.

Days pass, night’s pass, both as banal and uneventful as one another. Each night my blanket becomes sorer and more unaccommodating as I attempt to sleep, the ward echoes copiously of threatening, inexorable and inevitable tones. My mind becomes more and more overloaded with feelings of which I have never known, they make no sense and I know they are only there because I am ill. I pray at night for a lobotomy. Oh how jealous I am of those that are free. I am fucked.
Days turn into weeks, and days themselves are undistinguishable, they are each a series of regimented events that make me lose the scope of time and the notion of existence. My life feels like a strictly controlled experiment, and as a result I feel rendered completely powerless, I am merely a subject, a piece of a puzzle, a piece of coal on the fire. My black blood seems to please the doctors down at the blood laboratory, and as a result they leave my arms so marked they parallel the state of a street junkie with a twenty-year habit. The stomach-churning irony of such a comparison is that a street junkie lives a cleaner life than l. I am now led to believe from these asinine ideas that my distorted mind has placed upon me, that I am in societies terms, a vile, treacherous being, not worthy of social acceptance. Nor am I able to be acknowledged in any way shape or form by any creature great or small. I am simply not ready to conform to the accepted normality that we all abide by. I am something far, far different. A revolutionist I’m not, a realist I am. My thirst leaves me well and truly on the outskirts of what is acceptable but more importantly what is available, one cannot fix his fix whilst being incarcerated in the house of yellow and white. I am fucked.
Lord knows I have done terrible things, truly terrible things, if I had known this was the end then perhaps I’d have rethought my actions? Doubtful. Trying to recall life seems impossible within here, but perhaps that is because I lived no life. I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life dedicated to causing pain and destruction, I have alienated every single person I have met with glee, I have ripped off, screwed over and fucked every single family member in every single orifice and I would have done it again given the chance; and so it’s come to this. I’m glad I have nobody here to see this.

Just when I think things haven’t gotten strange enough, they get worse. As I awake, I think and I ponder, the only real thing I can do. My eyes begin to leak, strange jets of fluid spill from my eyes and roll down my cheeks like a malfunctioning sprinkler. My body starts to shake and I begin to omit childlike noises, hellishly high pitched. The water continues to flow, and the body begins to spasm uncontrollably. Embarrassment firmly takes hold when even the yellow man looks perplexed. My body is shutting down bit by discomforting bit.

My thoughts and actions are now uncontrollable, I have become everything I hated in life and I am almost sure it’s for a reason. I will not let it get me though. I once read ‘Pain is temporary, pride is forever’, biggest load of shit I ever heard. The thirst is overtaking, the thoughts sometimes drown it out, but it’s there, it’s always there. Niggling, itching and tweaking at me, like some crack-addicted midget is pulling my hair follicles from the inside in the hope my dandruff is drugs. My mind is beyond twisted; I would kill myself within a second if I could.
The habitual, regimented pain is like a vacuum that never gets switched off. Within my head my entire body rocks like some crazed, decrepit madman, but because my body doesn’t move, it is all within my throbbing head: my swollen watermelon head, in which each fruitless seed is dying. I hear knocking and it becomes louder each day.

Time is diminishing rapidly. It’s bizarre because every second that passes I wish were my last, yet an appreciation of time overpowers me, something I have never truly felt. The thirst that once did grip me is now slowly vanishing like the aforementioned time. Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock.

Too late.

Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock.

Going, going, gone.