Mimi
The lights overhead flicker as they move faster and faster like some
reverse runway. A girl in blue bends over me.
“She’s tachycardic, looks like VT, we need to defibrillate...”
It’s too late, I think to myself. I’m not on a plane. Did I even get on one?
Did I make it to London? Did I get what I was looking for?
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
Iput off living, and now it’s too late.
They said my choices were foolish, that I was making a mistake. But I
told them—I shouted it from the top of my lungs—there were other ways to
die. Fear is the death of choice, and a mental death has to be just as
agonizing.
Iwant to laugh at the irony, at my foolishness, but a mask covers my
mouth. I want to laugh and laugh and laugh, but I don’t have it physically in
me.
Iwanted to live my life on my terms. I refused their fear when I
should’ve listened because now it’s too late.
The lights blur bright against a pale-yellow ceiling. Machines be ep as
my mother wails that I just wouldn’t listen.
Ifeel fear. I feel anxiety. No, those don’t feel right. Enough. This thing
I’m experiencing, it’s something else. Something stronger.
Doom.
The word comes to me with a cloaking of black.
My life is over before I get a chance to really live it.
Something brushes against my fingers, and I physically recoil at the
sensation. It all happens so quickly, this sense of a happening from
som eplace else. Some other time and space. I inhale a life-filled gasp, my
body jerking upright as though yanked by a force greater than my own.
Meoowwww.
Ipress my hand over my heart as I begin to laugh. I can feel it pounding
under my skin—it’s still there, it’s working, I’m okay—as I glance down.
Aunt Doreen’s ginger cat stares back at me through the gloom.
“Oh, it’s you.” I press one hand to his thick fur without moving the
other from my still-racing heart.
Just a dream.
Just regret.
It’s not real.