When I realized that I had a gift, I couldn’t tell anybody about it because as far as they were concerned, “gifted” had a whole new meaning in my life. For instance, my parents knew that I was gifted in failing all of my classes in school. My friends knew that I was gifted in ignoring their text messages even after we had made plans for the night because I didn’t want to hang out. I was gifted in stealing extra change my Grandma left out on the table at her house and using it to buy soda. I was gifted in leaving the refrigerator door open all through the night so that the milk spoiled. Hell, I was even gifting in forgetting my first real girlfriend’s last name, which was the reason why she dumped me in the first place. All throughout my life, none of these granted “gifts” helped me at all, which is why I wrote it off when one finally did.
To be honest, it was probably sometime around last year when I was sitting in Physics class at my first semester of college for some degree I wasn’t sure that I would ever get. My parents had a gift of expecting too much from me, and so there I sat on every wasted penny they had thrown into my further education, wondering if I would ever make anything of myself. Spacing out and thinking about all the friends I left behind and weighing my options between becoming a male stripper and working at McDonald’s for the rest of my life, both of which sounded pretty good to me at the time.
Just as I was spacing out, I felt a crushing pressure in my head, much like the start of a tension headache but mixed with a resolute feeling of panic that drifted all the way from the base of my skull somewhere in the upper region. All of a sudden I had the “fight or flight” feeling that made the words “brain aneurysm” pop into my head and I just about flew out of my seat in fear. It was at this point that I was nearly calling out to my teacher, when the door to the classroom burst open and one of the other professors screamed, “Mrs. Edenburgh fainted!” As everybody gasped and rushed out of their seats and into the hallway, I hit the floor with my hands over my head and the pain subsided. With no other words in my mind than what the fuck, I slowly made my way over the door to see what the commotion was about.
Mrs. Edenburgh, a technical assistant, fell victim to a massive heart attack that took her life.
Little by little, as life went on as it does and I became more and more interested in a mixture of my classes and smoking pot after class, I forgot about the incident. However, this was not an occasion that lasted very long at all and before I knew it, I was reminded of the feeling all too soon.
It was a day like any other, really bleak and really boring, when I received a phone call from my mother. From the moment I picked up the phone and felt the panic in the words she was spraying out to me, my mind went absolutely blank. The pressure returned, but tenfold. In an instant of hearing her voice, it went all the way from the minor pressure I had felt before and instantly erupted into an explosion in my head. I pictured fireworks going off and nearly landed on the floor in panic, but I reminded myself that this had happened before and nothing bad was going to happen. I asked my mother to repeat what she had said, and she burst out sobbing, screaming, “Your father was in a terrible car accident! Honey, you have to come home!”
I drove the 50 miles home and witnessed the aftermath of the scene, the crumbled Range Rover, right in the middle of town. People were standing everywhere, shaking their heads at the mess left over from a commercial trucking accident gone wildly wrong. My heart flew straight into my chest as I floored it to the hospital, tears streaking before my eyes. How could this have been prevented? What could I have done to be a better son? What scene would meet my eyes when I got there?
The moment I rounded the corner to his hospital room, I saw the fear in my mother’s eyes and the pain she was feeling all at once. She collapsed into my arms, crying harder than I had ever seen my mother cry before, which was unbelievable because I was her son and I was one of her biggest letdowns on many levels. I remembered in that moment all the times that I wasn’t there for her and I could feel the forgiveness beating out of her soul as she grasped me tighter and whispered, “Oh, honey, he didn’t make it.”
Five years later, and I’m out of college and pursuing a career in the science field, wondering if I ever made him proud before he left. Five years later and I’ve had that extreme pressure in my head more times than I can count on even twenty people’s fingers. Once for when I caught my fiancé hooking up with the neighbor through his bedroom window. Once right before my sister called me to tell me that her dog ran away. Once before I witnessed my job’s building catch fire on the news late at night. It’s a sign of impending doom. It’s a curse, and a prize all at once.
That’s why I knew what it meant when I was making a sandwich in the kitchen and I heard two people fighting over the television in the other room. Suddenly, I was seizing on the floor, the pressure building to a boiling point, its ultimate peak. Before the eruption occurred, I was able to crawl out of the kitchen and into the living room, where I screamed bloody murder as I reached for the phone to call 9-1-1. I was dying. Something awful was about to happen.
It was then that I saw Hillary and Trump fighting on the television screen. The moment I saw their faces and the argumentative hate speech spitting out of their disgusting mouths, the pain subsided.
Submitted September 18, 2016 at 05:40AM by horriddaydream http://ift.tt/2d70XTr nosleep
No comments:
Post a Comment