Читать книгу Falling out of Heaven - John Lynch - Страница 10

I believed that I was falling. It was as real to me as my next breath. As I lay there in that hospital bed night after night all I could see was the tumble of my body through space. I could feel the moisture of the clouds bathe my face and the wind tugging at my clothes. I could see my life spread out before me like a half-assembled jigsaw. Sometimes I was glad and enjoyed the sensation, happy to be leaving everything behind. Other times fear held my hand as I fell and I would shake and moan as I saw the ground below hurtling towards me. I remember grabbing at the air, trying to find something to hold on to. I had left love behind and my only hope was these men and women who tended to me, whose job it was to bring people like me back from the brink.

I fell into my past. I walked the hard ground of my childhood again. I saw our marriage. I saw our love begin and end. I became a ghost walking the corridors of the living. They told me later that it wasn’t uncommon for a man in my condition to believe strange things, to think that he is in peril. Some never return from the strange land that they find themselves in. Hell is alive and well in the minds of men such as me, one of the nurses said with a strange grin on his face.

There were times as I lay in that hospital room when I felt my fear subside, it was as fleeting as a bad man’s smile. For a moment, I was embraced by a sense of peace, and my body’s fever abated. It was in moments like these that I tried to ask God to forgive me, but I was still too angry with him and the words never made it past my lips. I still blamed him for all that my father had done to me. He died a long time ago but he still had a hold on the guts of my being. His hands are always there twisting and pulling. Sometimes when I was falling I could hear him whispering, taunting me.

I thought of my life, of how I had believed that I was a fortress, standing alone on the horizon of other people’s lives. I saw how much of a lie that was. I had learned the hard way. Here I was, alone, dependent on the kindness of these doctors. I thought of all the pain I had caused, the misery I had brought to my door and the doors of others. At night sometimes when I woke I would call for someone to come and sit with me. If no-one came I would lie there shivering in the dark hoping that my fall was almost at an end.