Life Writing - Here Today...

Here Today…

I am off school but I don’t care. I am lying on a worn brown velvet sofa bed that has no mattress but I know my mother has put a sheet on it because I wake up with it wrapped around me sometimes. I am sleeping in this bed because I am too sick to climb the ladder to my bunk, which now seems far away, an illusion that is reinforced by the sky blue of my bedroom walls. I have a recurring nightmare in which I am trying to climb a hill through a forest to rescue a princess and my legs and lungs are burning. I have turned back and am running down the slope, legs spinning out of control. I look behind me and see huge stripped tree trunks rolling down the hill, catching me up. In a flurry of pink they kill the princess. I am panting now. I feel a tug on my ankle. I keep running. Then I feel a pull. They are pulling me down. I am going to be crushed to death. The falling sensation wrenches me awake where I affirm my existence before untangling myself from the bed sheet.
      ‘It might just be flu.’ My grandmother, who I am sure should have gone home days ago, tells me this with a smile that I know is meant to be reassuring. One afternoon I feel particularly bad and my peculiar, floor-based perspective gradually clears, like fog, to reveal nothing but black.
      White. Everything is white and out of focus. Edges sharpen and colour leaks in from a television on the wall facing me. Elmo in Sesame Street. I am not afraid and I am comfortable. The bed I am in seems more like a landscape in which I am lost. My father is standing in front of the T.V. and is smiling and reassuring me whilst his knuckles grow whiter from gripping the chrome frame of the bed. He talks and talks but I am not listening. A doctor and a nurse loom to my left. Whilst they are moving me around I feel a tug at my skin. When no one is around I investigate the plaster on the back of my hand by rolling up one corner until I can see, like a straw in a juice carton, a tube going in to me....