It has begun.
A reprieve at last, and arising from such dire circumstances. I can hardly believe what happened a fortnight ago did truly transpire. Leaning my head against the window, my mum driving, I stared stonily at the rain trees that lined the expressway. Perhaps sensing something was on my mind, my mother said, isn't life beautiful. A far cry from what I was thinking. Myself, I wondered how the world would look without me in it, and realized nothing would be different. Them trees would still be there, the cars as well, the day sunny anyway.
When I awoke, it took me but an instant to realize what had happened. My mother and my sister were beside my bed, my mother smiling in a truly happy way I'd not seen for a long time. Perhaps I should have been shell-shocked, or at least surprised to find myself in a hospital bed in the ICU, but to be honest, I was somewhat relieved. The machines around me, the wires and tubes snaking all over my upper body, they were breathing for me, making sure my heart did not stop again. To be alive was, oddly, no longer my responsibility, and for that I felt a curious relief.
Something snapped in my brain. I recall thinking that the tablet looked so lonely there in the bottle by itself and the next I knew, I was emptying the rest of my meds into the bottle. T'was as if there were no rational faculty in my mind. I knew what I was doing and it seemed the most perfectly normal thing to do. My last thought, I remember now, looking at the myriad colors, bewitched, was how pretty they all looked. I suppose that's what some might call madness. I slept, then sleep became something else, every organ turned lethargic under its intoxicating spell.
*
"So."
"Is that so?"
*
I remember, once in therapy, being made to re-enact our deaths so as to be resurrected, to be alive anew. I guess I took it a little too seriously this time. But oh how alive I do feel, right now! Suddenly it is as though the beating my body underwent has caused my mind to finally drop its own poisoned shackles. I have canvases sitting ready. I have words again. I have taken a trip to Bountiful via a pitch-black tunnel and better than having my canvases ready, I, I am finally ready. I have lived more in the last two weeks than in the whole time since I returned to Singapore so many years before. I love it. I cannot have enough of it. It is not life of which I speak but some charge in my mind that had been lost, lost, but found then while my body was slowing into a permanent sleep. Forced back to wakefulness, suddenly I realize I have emerged with it from depths unknown.
I am ready now.
