FLASH FICTION
Sometimes I have a lot on my mind: Usually it's a pleasant confusion, as I decide what to write next. Because usually, I've got a lot on my mind. Just occasionally, the confusion will be such that I can't separate fact from fiction. At the moment, I'm looking forward to a family holiday at my parents' house with my children. This has been a long time coming, since I fucked everyone's lives up through drink.
There are those who still judge me: The plastic police and the defective detectives. That's fine. When you've suffered as many broken bones as I have, you develop a thick skin, so rude words are like water off of my tired back. Most of the self-appointed judiciary haven't known me long enough to remember me in 1986. There are similarities between waking from a coma then, and sobering up more recently, sometimes wondering "Why?". It feels like this:
That thing
Every life is something which it wasn't before, every single moment of the day. Everything you see, hear and feel, wasn't there a moment ago. Every story starts as a blank page:
As it awoke, it didn't know: It didn't know that it was awake at first because to be awake was a new thing for it. It could see, but it didn't know what it could see as you and I do. It didn't know that it was seeing, hearing and feeling: It was all new.
It didn't know where it was or how it had come to be there. It didn't know who or what it was. It didn't know why things should be like that and whether that was normal.
If you, me, or anyone had been there at that moment, we might have been able to tell it what was all around us. In those first moments though, it wouldn't have understood. We'd have needed to spend far more time with it than anyone has time.
Perhaps it was in awe, or maybe it was frightened. We won't know, because we weren't there. In the blink of an eye, it lived a whole life. It was an amazing thing, but no-one saw it.
I couldn't explain it, just as the amazing thing couldn't explain its surroundings. It was all too brief and now we were blind again.
But something had happened: There was something in the universe which hadn't been there before. A story had been written and memories created: Permanent markers in space-time. Even if it didn't wake again; even if it was gone forever more: There is another place.
The other place is the forever after: Instantly created by something you saw.
It will now be with you forever more.
Everything can change, suddenly and for no apparent reason. The next time I wake up, I'll try to explain things better.
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