Regret poured over me like a frigid breeze cutting through a threadbare jacket. This wasn’t how I imagined it happening. I’d always pictured dying to be… well, more dramatic? Meaningful even..? Unfortunately, like the rest of my life, my death is panning out to fit in like a Tetris block.

Pathetic, unimpressive, and soaked in irony.

“Paralyzed?” I thought to myself, upon having an arm I was clearly attempting to move deny my efforts. “Body is… definitely broken. Maybe my spine?” The air had been knocked from my chest but at the very least I wasn’t completely unconscious.

A low, weak, gurgle coughed itself from my lungs and forced its way through my throat. Even breathing properly it seems, was beyond my grasp at this point. If I had to hazard a guess, it would be due to a collapsed lung. I’d say I was cold, but then I’d have to be able to gauge temperature. The problem is, I realized, that I can’t feel anything. 

I was no stranger to pain, so I was well aware of all of its forms and iterations. This… this felt different, and different when you’re forty feet down a ravine is not a good thing.

On top of having been a fairly rough and tumble kid, I wasn't afraid of a fight, even in my twenties. Although…  I’d never gotten my ass kicked quite badly enough to elicit this kind of physical trauma. Having come of age in upstate New York and being absolutely dirt poor meant, among other things, that pain darkened my doorstep more often than not.

The lack of pain… in contrast to pain however… in this situation? Now that was worrying. The numbness was especially worrying. I’ve experienced a lot of different rail lines that the pain train tended to barrel down, and it’s ironic that for once in my life the fact that every painful sensation surging through my body mere minutes ago was being muted, troubled me.

No… what I was feeling couldn’t even be described as sensations. it was the absence of feeling… like a leg that’s fallen asleep. It was like my entire body was some vestigial phantom limb connected to a consciousness, and even the consciousness was starting to fade.

“Weird… weird and concerning…” I thought foggily, while staring up into the sky.

Fat, slow, snowflakes wafted down towards me out of the matte-black night as the very occasional headlight from forty feet above cast a dull hue on what little I could see. If there were stars, then the lights of the nearby city, cloud cover, specks of snow, or a combination of all three were obfuscating them.

“The leg bones connected to the…” I sang in my head, in an attempt to keep myself calm while trying to move my leg.“ hip bone..?” No dice... I grimaced internally, starting to feel the rush of blood behind my ears which signaled the first blush of panic. 

“Yeah… paralyzed.” and dying… definitely dying if this situation doesn’t improve.

Regardless, even if there was a snowball’s chance in hell I had to keep trying to suss out what parts of my body were damaged. “What my broke-ass would give for a big, fat, hospital bill right about now.” I thought, allowing my mind to start wandering a bit.

Healthcare wasn’t exactly at the forefront of my families priorities. We dealt with anything that wasn’t lethal in the way anyone in our financial situation did. Ignoring it. My brother had so eloquently called us “Too broke to be considered poor.” and it was an apt description. My parents' tenuous finances resulted in fully embracing a ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ mentality… and they instilled that Attitude into me by osmosis.

I mean, they didn’t really have a choice. I’m sure a wonderfully cushy life with a silver spoon lodged in my throat while a butler wiped my ass would have been more comfortable, but we were a mile high and a kilometer deep from that kind of life. It would have been nice though…

So yeah… Broken bones healed… or they didn’t.

Dental issues were fixed with mouthwash and expired painkillers, or you’d get a tooth pulled at the free clinic. My mother rationed her insulin which caused more issues further down the line. I winced. One of the main things that had led to her death a few years prior was directly related to that unfortunate frugal rationing. 

When absolutely necessary our healthcare plan was a trip to the emergency room and we’d ignore the bills until they went to collections. After all, you can’t garnish wages if everything’s in cash and you don’t use a bank.

Being poor… is expensive, and it has a higher cost in both body and soul that’s extracted over time. It was a twisted compromise that people in our position made but aside from winning the lottery there really wasn’t any other way.

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My mind kept wandering…

I watched my father slowly deteriorate in only the way a blue collar ‘salt of the earth’ father can. First his knees. Then his back, and eventually he had trouble closing his hands. The body he relied so heavily on eventually betrayed him. It was like a sickness was spreading from his toes to his tongue and sure enough, eventually that sickness made its way into his eyes. Slowly at first with a glance downward and a grimace… and then more noticeably when he smiled. 

When the corners of his deep brown, weathered eyes refused to match his upturned mouth, I knew in my heart that the sickness was terminal. This life… those twelve hour days he sacrificed for my brother, my mother and I, were going to kill him. They were the eyes of a man who’s fought so passionately, for so long, that the light in his gaze had dulled to a deadened husk of its original luster.

I breathed out a long, staggered, ragged breath.

It exited my body as a plume of fog as snow hit my open eyes and melted, over and over again. How long has it been since I blinked?

 “This… cannot be good…” I brooded.

For some reason my thoughts swayed back to my father. In truth I saw my father very little when I was younger, but not because he was a bad father.

His late nights weren’t spent out drinking or running around on my mother. The hours after the sun dipped below the horizon were spent taking the two hour drive back home after twelve hours working under the table for some shitty foreman. They were further divided to help my disabled mother finish making dinner, cleaning up afterwards and putting my brother and I to bed. All in all that man had an hour to himself before collapsing onto a cheap bed he was too good for.

Watching him grow old while being far too young to be so old, and pass away, was like watching the strongest, tallest, iron-barked oak in the forest be slowly cut down by greedy woodsmen to be made into firewood.

“Fuck…” I thought, tears beginning to collect at the edges of my eyes. I miss the shade of that tree… It was starting to feel like a comfortable blanket was being wrapped around me as even my vision started to blur.

“FUCK!...”

A bolt of pain ricocheted through my body as something deep inside me fought back against my paralyzed frame and muddy thoughts. Along with the pain my vision cleared… which made the next thing I noticed all the more disconcerting.

*Static* ... ...

“WHAT THE SUGAR COATED FUCK?!” I shrieked internally with gritted teeth, unable to actually speak.

Overlaid upon the screensaver-esque backdrop of powdery specks falling from above, a line of text appeared in bold lettering reminiscent of a blocky game font. It was surrounded by a strange turquoise rectangle, and I could have sworn there was a soft *blip* sound effect accompanying its arrival.

The fever dream pop-up wasn’t my main concern however. A line of expletives that would make an alphabet city prostitute blush came flooding into my mind as pure, unfiltered, agony washed through every nerve in my body. Whatever thoughts I was mulling over were like scribbles on a dry-erase board now, swept clean as every sense that had been dulled went white in pain.

… And just as quickly as the pain came, it was gone again.

“Okay… Alright… o-fuckin-kay… I need to keep thinking. I need to stay conscious or I’m done for. And what the fuck was that?”

Unable to even close my eyes, it wasn’t as if I could survey the area, but I stilI focused my attention straight ahead rather than allowing myself to ruminate inwardly. Just snow and blackness… A branch looming over me about eight feet above me to the left, but that was that? The strange dialogue box?

“I must be hallucinating.” I thought to myself, almost feeling my pupils dilate in a renewed effort to focus on the sky above. It must have been a mental holdover from one of the many games I’d played over the years. It was possible that a major artery in my neck was being pinched, leading to oxygen loss, resulting in hallucinations.

Yeah… that had to be it… And to be fair I didn’t know which scenario would be more desirable. Hallucinations due to hypoxia, or an actual dialogue box gracing me with its presence while I was slowly bleeding out.

My mind was rattled. 

A jumble of thoughts and misfiring neurons inside my skull were all trying to get my attention at once. My brain felt like a puzzle after it had been thrown haphazardly back into the box. If vertigo could seep into your soul I assume that’s how this would feel. “Let’s backtrack…” I thought hazily.

That jolt scrambled something but… Dad?…. yes! I was thinking about my father, but why? He’s been dead for years. So has my mother for that matter. “I was… Thinking about my father and…” I desperately attempted to rearrange the puzzle of my mind. “ yes… that was it…”

Towards the end of the thought, a wave of nothingness had almost dragged me into unconsciousness. That must be what it feels like to die… or to come damned close to it. The void of nothingness, threatening to pull me beneath its weight had elicited a myoclonic jerk from every inch of my body… That was what that pain was, I was sure of it now. 

It took me a few moments to re-wrangle my thoughts into any form of cohesion.

Even now I was beginning to slip back in the abyss of unfeeling. A void of mute sensations wrapped its cold arms around my body, threatening to drag it deep into the icy depths… and my mind was being glazed over by a thick and seemingly infinite fog. I have to follow a train of thought. Trains move and if I keep moving… even internally, then I wont stop moving… and to stop moving right now would be very… very, bad.

Aside from the hellish jolt of pain earlier there was nothing to anchor me. I needed an anchor.

I went over the chain of events that led me to this unfortunate circumstance, jumbled as they were. I needed to reconstruct not just what I was thinking about, but where I was and why I was there. Maybe something in all of that would help me now.

Slowly I began to arrange the pieces.