r (reposeremembers) wrote in repose, @ 2020-04-19 22:14:00 |
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Entry tags: | audrey carpenter, ~plot: memories |
Memory
What: Memory
Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing
Warning, this memory contains: Illness
You sleep a lot now, like Sleeping Beauty, but there's no prince charming, and it's pain that wakes you every single morning, not kisses.
The white walls around you are home. They've been home for months and months, and the nurses have brought you crayons and paper, and there's a garden on the walls of the room. Flowers have sprouted up their daily, watered and cared for, and you had to stand on the bed to hang the final few. But the walls are splashes of color. Blue and red and pink and yellow. Vibrant green leaves, and at first it was just the walls. Ceiling to floor, and so many flowers that everyone comments on it when they come in. And they come in a lot.
Medicines, medicines, dialysis, blood draws, immunosuppressants, steroids, more dialysis, and you're not really cute right now. You've covered the mirrors with the garden, too, because you're firmly a tween, and you're bloated and moon-faced, and you're yellow and not in a cute way. Your hair is thin, and you're skinny, skinny, skinny beneath the bloating and the skin that tears if anyone so much as touches it. You're shades of purple and yellow and green, and you're a garden too, one tended by needles and kind words from tired nurses.
It's been forever, because things have gotten bad. No one says you're going to die, but you know better. You can tell, and you hardly have the strength to sit up in the bed anymore. Even now, trying to eavesdrop on Dad and the doctor, you can't entirely sit up. Your belly is swollen and filled with fluids that you can't pronounce, and the doctor is saying, "it has to be now," and your Dad is doing that thing he does when he's nervous. You can't see him, but you know he's rubbing his head, back and forth, as he tries to avoid making a hard decision. In the end, it's your stepmother who takes things in hand. Your stepmother always takes things in hand, and you don't like her very much. She isn't mean or bad or cruel, but she isn't Mom, and Dad does everything she says and always.
You aren't sure when you fell asleep, but you did. The garden is dark now, and the sky beyond the paper-flower windows is dark. The room is dark, and there's only the illuminating glow of beeping machines.
You feel a little bit stronger, and you swing your legs over the side of the bed, and you stand. You're tired, and the note on the dry-erase board catches your eye: No food or fluids after midnight. Surgery 8 am.
You blink a few times, and you try to decide if you're scared. But you're not. You're not, because you're tired of fighting. You're tired of this body that doesn't work right, and you're tired of the pain that is always, always there. You don't know the name of the painkillers, but none of them silence the pain anymore, so you're not scared.
You stand there, in the dark, surrounded by paper flowers, and you twirl once. Just once, and then you collapse on the bed. The machines beep frenetically, and you laugh a twinkling laugh, one drenched in tears and anger and the unfairness of everything, and the nurses come and chastise, and they tucked you back in, and they cluck. You miss Mom. You miss your mom, and you miss your dad, and you miss your brothers, and you miss your sisters.
You miss outside. You miss living. You hate the paper flowers that line the room, and they're the last thing you see before the medicine they slip you tugs you under again. You sleep a lot now.