I can’t think straight. The only thing I can focus on is the pain. I’m sweating half my water weight and haven’t consumed anything since a week ago. Throughout that week I’ve done nothing besides lie in my bed and drink two glasses of water. I don’t drink much water to begin with. I reach for the medicine cabinet looking for some aspirin and as I’m about to grab the bottle my left hand, which is supporting most of my weight slips off the edge of a slippery sink. My feet and legs don’t react and the rest of my body comes crashing down. I’m pretty sure on the way down my head caught the edge of that sink. The gray tiled floor feels cold. Too cold. Now it seems a rather stupid idea for decorating my apartment in only black, white, and grays.
However, it’s never too late to add some color, and it seems that this thought of mine is doing the job for me. I can’t move, but from what I can see, there’s a puddle of red gradually growing and spreading next to me on these gray tiles. It reminds me of water and oil. They’re not mixing. One is not seeping into the other and there’s a clear difference where one ends and the other begins. I’m pretty sure by now the left side of my face is drowning in this pool of red liquid. It hasn’t fully registered what this red consistency is, but somewhere in my mind I think I’m about to realize.
All of a sudden there is a splitting pain on the top left corner of my forehead. The pain was too much that I think my body developed a spasm from it, but the shock was not enough for me to regain control of my limbs. From the corner of my eye I see that my left arm is now also drowning in the pool of red. There are some splattered dots running down my forearm around my wrist that remind me of the edges of a Jackson Pollock. It must have been from the spasm.
As I try to move my left arm, I think I feel some movement in my right. I try to bend my right knee and I see that my left one does it instead. As I try to move my left arm again, a shooting pain comes rushing into that very left corner of my forehead and that’s when I realize it.
This isn’t my body.
And that pool of red..
It can’t be mine.
© estalement 2008
