For the next several days, I tried thinking up names for the girl in my dreams, but none seemed to fit. Actually, it was like my mind wouldn't accept and recognize what I picked to be her name. I would think up a name, and when I'd try to say it while imagining the girl and associating her with it, the name would suddenly become inaudible to me. I would hear that sound from my dreams, the muffling sound that always blocked out her name, even when I spoke it. I could feel my lips shaping the word and my vocal cords shaking to create the sound, but I could never hear it when I spoke it.
As always, my meetings with the girl were much less calm and platonic than that magical night. I would wake up, we would talk a little, and sometimes I would be able to wrap my arm around her and hold her for a few minutes, but it never advanced past that.
I was standing in the boy's bathroom at school, muttering curses in front of the urinal. I had been there for more than five minutes and I needed to piss like a truck driver, but I couldn't even break the seal.
"Goddammit, I don't need another health issue. Just piss already."
I finally groaned as the reserves were released, but as soon as I looked down into the urinal and saw the color red, I gritted my teeth and began to shake in frustration. After finishing my answer to nature's call, I walked over to the sink and leaned against it, trembling from head to toe.
"SON OF A BITCH!" I roared, punching the nearby wall and splitting my knuckles.
With my hand bleeding, I walked out of the bathroom and back to class, where a math test was being taken. Returning to my desk, I began stuffing my things into my bag, splattering blood from my hand and muttering curses.
"Marcus, is something wrong?" the teacher asked from her desk.
"I need to leave, I need to get to the hospital. It seems my kidneys are now failing."
I was with my parents in Dr. Turner's office, who was looking over the results from my blood tests. With a sigh, she closed the folder.
"The good news is that the damage isn't permanent, at least at this stage. The bad news is that the kidney failure was caused by highly excessive pill usage. We originally had you set at the maximum possible level; did you think you could go even further without consequences? Just the number of pain killers alone you're taking are enough to kill you, add in the anti-convulsion meds, the blood thickeners, and everything else, and it's a miracle you're still alive."
"Right, so I should just get on my knees and thank God that I'm not dead yet, I should just be grateful that I get to keep living each day with never-ending agony and mind-tearing seizures," I muttered, keeping my face downcast with my hood over my eyes.
My parents looked at each other in both nervousness and fear, wishing that there were something they could do.
"I'm afraid that you're going to have to start cutting down on your medication if you don't want to continue urinating blood. You may even have to give up cold turkey until your immunity wears off so that when you resume taking them, they'll be affective once again. If you keep going at those pills the way you have been, your kidneys will become completely unusable and you'll need a transplant, and considering your disease and your drug habits beyond pills, no transplant committee will let you so much as look at a healthy donor."
"Beyond pills? Marcus, what is she talking about?" my mom asked desperately.
"Last week... I tried heroine. It was just once and it didn't work as well as I had hoped. I certainly don't feel any cravings for it."
"Marcus, are you crazy?! After everything you've been told about drugs and after all the times we've warned you about their dangers, you would resort to using heroine?" my dad exclaimed, more upset and desperate than angry at me.
"Well it's not like my life can get any worse!" I yelled before getting up and storming out of the office.
In the weeks that passed, my parents tried to limit the amount of pills I took, but it was just as difficult for them as it was for me, because just by looking at me, they could tell how badly I needed them. As expected, my pain increased, as well as the intensity and frequency of my seizures. I stopped sleeping, unable to ever calm myself down enough to relax. As January moved onto February, I finally gave in and quit taking my meds, allowing my body to work the chemicals out of my system and lose its developed immunity.
I spent that hellish week at home in bed, howling at the top of my lungs while the seconds ticked by with sadistic slowness. Without anything to even muffle the full stimulation of all my pain receptors, my body was essentially ripping itself apart from the inside out. I couldn't even tell when I was having a seizure or not, it just all felt the same. Every second, I felt like my flesh was being shredded away by flaming chainsaws while twin lobotomies were performed on my brain with jagged icicles.
My parents had to stay home from work to take care of me, as I could not go to the bathroom or feed myself. They could do nothing but sit by my bed and listen to me scream, always trying to think of a way to help me. They tried to endure it, unable to ask my little brother or older sister to look after me without feeling any more guilt than they already were. For days, my sense of time blurred. I was unable to tell night from day, hot from cold, or dream from reality. When I was awake, I often hallucinated, and the only times I ever slept were when I finally managed to pass out from pain or exhaustion, and even then, it never lasted longer than an hour.
Lying in bed, in the throws of a seizure, I felt a deep thud in my chest, as if my heart had just slammed against my ribcage. My sweat became clammy and I began to lose my control over my limbs. Barely able to breathe from the pain already surging through me, I felt a second powerful thud in my chest. I could sense my pulse, hear it pounding in my ears, and feel the loss of rhythm. My heart was struggling to continue beating, unable to bear the strain any longer. Neither of my parents was in the room and I couldn't call them, my lungs refusing to work.
'Is this it? Will I finally die?'
My heart at last stopped, but instead of closing my eyes, I continued to stare upwards, watching as the ceiling of my bedroom vanished to reveal the eye of God, spinning overhead. My bed disappeared beneath me, my room following suit to reveal the vastness of space. I was so close to the celestial nexus that I could almost see the individual tongues of flame in the typhoon surrounding the black hole pupil. The star occupied the entire horizon, as if slicing reality in half so that one side was the dark cosmos and the other side was the sea of nuclear fire. I was about a kilometer from the surface of the black hole, which had shrunk down to the size of a ten-story building.
'So close... I'm so close...' I thought, desperately reaching out to be accepted into desired oblivion.
The clothes I had been wearing were vaporized from my body, signaling my last ties to the real world being severed. But answering my silent call, the girl from my hallucinations appeared, flying out of the black hole towards me, arms outstretched, tears in her eyes. She slowed as she reached me, coming to a stop before gently embracing me and holding me close with our unclothed bodies pressed together.
