bad dreams come true
A recurring dream: one of a helpless man on a hospital bed, incapacitated and left to himself without a fragment of hope. Legs wrapped in cast and hung up in the air, and arms in a similar fashion. The constant, frustrating beep, boop, of the machine reading his vitals beside him. It’s the only thing that keeps him awake and away from sliding into a coma of despair.
What does it mean to lose everything?
I watch as people troop into this man’s room day after day; some kneel to pray with him, some stay the longest and talk for hours on end, and all through, you can see the radiance in his face, the apparent joy that he has people take lunch breaks and entire days off to see him. Family in his corner, people that cared about him.
But at night, when all the lights are off, and there’s minimal attention in the private rooms, I hear the grunts and cries of a man in pain. “I have nothing left. Nothing.” What does the man who gets more visitors than everyone mean by ‘nothing’? The entitlement annoys me, and I mumble in anger as I pass the reception to talk to one of the orderlies. He cries nothing, and yet he has but a few broken bones. He could at least be grateful for his life.
The orderly hands me a file, and I look into it; I scan the list of visitors — which is entirely too long — and notice no one bears his surname. “No immediate family? Was he divorced?” And then my eyes flutter to the Next of Kin section on his file.
Deceased. “Deceased?” I’m confused.
The orderly looks at me with dull eyes and a tone that must have sputtered it off to about a hundred people asking what the word deceased is doing there: “Accident with wife and kids, the lone survivor. He refuses to name any other family. According to him, they’re either all dead or missing.”
This is where the dream ends, and I don’t go back to sleep so easily. But every other week, I close my eyes every night, and I’m haunted by this man crying. “Nothing. I have nothing.”
Again, what does it mean to have nothing? What does it mean to lose everything?
It took me years to understand, but it has finally come full circle, and I now see that it’s the thing you value the most. When you lose it, you lose everything. When you lose it, you lose all hope, all zest for life. There is no need to play the games men play anymore. All you have left for life is a deep dislike for human beings and a pair of glasses that tint your surroundings grey.
If not black.
To lose everything is to lose the thing that wakes you up in the morning and makes you put in senseless and unexplainable man-hours doing what you love and grunting through what you don’t. To lose everything is to have everything you’ve dreamed of going up in dust, like a burst of glitter in the air. Grab at it; you’ll only hold a few sprinkles of what was once there.
All you will have is what you can remember. And that serves nothing to your benefit but pain. You will remember the pain.
I suffered a concussion in mid-June in the quarter-finals of my last tournament and lost about 20–30 minutes of memory with it. While people are generally intrigued and ask if I remember anything, I want to lie and say I do.
Because I can remember the game I couldn’t play, the high emotions I faced on the sideline, unable to contribute or help my team that day. I watched as they faced pressure and played some of the highest-intensity football I had ever seen. I can remember the crowd around the pitch, the inordinately gapped screams of surprise, and the excitement that comes with playing one of the biggest games in the school.
But what keeps me awake at night is, one minute to the end of the game, a deep, bellowed, and resounding shout of GOAL that wasn’t for us. I remember falling to my knees. I couldn’t look at the pitch. All I could look at were my hands. It felt like there was nothing there. Literally and figuratively.
Nothing to grab on to anymore, just a weird empty feeling that refused to go away. It was as if Thanos had snapped his fingers, and the thing I had mentally tied myself to was fading into dust. Until today, I can never forget that feeling — losing everything you dreamed of and worked for. Just disappearing, vanishing into the wind, without the courtesy to say goodbye.
It’s the same feeling as losing your favorite person. One minute they’re there. The next, they’re not. An endless, empty space that used to be them. And that’s the real pain: when you try to touch them again, there’s no familiar feeling that warms your insides. You remember the tingles they sent through your mind — platonic, romantic, it doesn’t matter — and suddenly, your brain is doing a frantic search for them, running round your neural rooms to find the person you loved so much.
And all you will remember is the pain, the pain of their non-existence.
This is what it feels like to lose everything. To have nothing worth living for, no goals that matched up to the dreams you built with that person. To lay in your bed in the early morning hours, holding on to the shreds of your heart left behind. No energy to get up. No energy to begin the day. All that was worth working for is now dust.
Fragments of matter enough to blind you but not to grab on to.
But sometimes, you will close your eyes and remember the joy: the laughter, the warmth, and the feeling of family they brought you. You will see what it felt like to be loved and cherished by that little girl who always looked up to you with big fat eyes. The boy that holds onto your leg for everything, the brother you spent your entire life fighting with, and the partner you want to feel so desperately.
You even get delusional. New memories start to crop up, things that never happened. That never will happen. You construct a fairyland in your mind where everything went the way you wanted it to, and you see yourself at the end of the rainbow with the thing you wanted the most, the people you love the most. Everything present, and everywhere happy. Tears, joyful tears.
When I don’t want to remember the pain, this is what I remember. What never happened. What could.
When I go back to sleep, I’m passing by his room again, and he’s gone silent now. I crack the door open to confirm if he isn’t finally dead, but the heart monitor indicates otherwise. This time his face isn’t a contorted picture of emotion and pain. He’s grinning in his sleep.
I leave the room. I wish he could be like this all the time.
