As you might have noticed: I have switched the theme day from Thursday to Monday, to better balance the week. If you are confused, let me remind you that today is Monday and not Thursday, although I wish it was not so...
The object of this theme: Write about your weekend in such a way to match the images and hopefully entertain.
What actually happened this weekend.
It's odd that a voice, or a word said in certain way, can bring back memories quicker than anything else. You hear a familar voice across a crowded room, someone you have not heard in years; and the feelings you had at your last meeting come back to you like a deep unstoppable current.
This weekend it happened to me. The format was a dream: A telephone rang twice, I picked it up, she asked "hello?", I answered "hi", then a meaninful silence that lasted a minute before waking me up.
I shook it off, pushed back the feeling and the memories that the sound of her voice in my dream invoked. In the morning I woke to the sounds of an actual phone ringing, just like my dream I picked it up and asked "Hello?". Just like my dream: silence. This time I could nothing to stop the painful memories and emotions, from spreading like jaundice from the blight buried deep within my kidney.
It was a weekend, like this one past, but two years ago. Driving home at night, she fed me chocolate covered Poki that we had just bought from the Japanese supermarket. She was wearing the thick, woolen, white sweater that I had just bought her from the gap, singing along to The Smiths: girlfriend in a coma, which had just started to play on the radio.
My memory then becomes a slideshow, bright shots etched in forever with nothing in between: A dog running in the street, her hand pointing, my white knuckles on the wheel, the pole. Then just voices, audio catching up with the video: "breathe into the mask", "we're going to take her out first", "try to stay calm", "bring the cutters here".
Then I remember waking up deathly cold, shaking. With blurred vision I recognized the inside of an ambulance, the shaking was not me but the ambulance rushing through the streets to it's destination. I looked to my left and saw someone else in the other cot. I was a stranger, she wore a red sweater and had white hair. I wondered if I had hit her with my car, I thought it was strange that she should be in the same ambulance as me.
"Your girlfriends in a coma", the ambulance man said when he noticed my eyes were open.
"She's not my girlfriend!" I replied curtly. I looked back at her again, my eyes seeing clearly now, her hair was not white it was bandages, and her sweater was not red, it was soaked with blood -- her blood. "She's my wife." I stammered before passing out.
When I came around again I was surrounded by doctors and nurses. I looked again to my left, through the double doors of the emergency room I saw my wife lying on a cart, all alone. I wondered why they were bothering so much with me, when she was more obviously hurt. I began to ask them to leave me alone and attend to her instead, but a nurse put a mask over my face and a doctor said "take him to OR".
When I woke I was in a recovery room, a surgeon was reading my chart, and talking to me like I could understand. He told me I had been very lucky, that I should have died, that they had to remove both of my kidneys, that I had a very rare blood type, that I was fortunate that they had found a donor that could give me a kidney and three pints of blood. I asked him about my wife, he said he was sorry but she had passed away as soon as she reached the hospital. I became angry, I told him that I was sorry they had let me live. He replied that it was my wife that had let me live, it was she who carried the donor card, it was her kidneys that were now in my body.
This is why her voice even in a dream affects me so, she is part of me now, I have no chance of letting her go.
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