Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: DAYDREAM (12/08/16)
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TITLE: To Be or Not To Be | Previous Challenge Entry
By Marlene Bonney
12/14/16 -
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“The sunlight’s too bright and hurts my eyes. Would youo please close those confounded blinds?” my usual morning querulous greeting to anyone entering the room.
I have become more comfortable retreating to my inner self, and who can blame me?
The first few months of my exile to this old folks home were alarmingly strange and unwelcome. I met opposition at every turn. The meals as tasteless as a newlywed bride’s first cooking attempt. . .the temperature in my room either hot enough to fry an egg on the floor or cold enough to freeze the nose of an Eskimo. . .the social activities far beneath my notice, more suitable for a geriatric senior with one foot in the grave. . .the nursing staff shouting at me as if I am deaf or mumbling in an intentional unintelligible murmur. . .the substandard candy-striper type volunteers offering to help me as if I am a feeble old woman, their young unwrinkled faces wreathed in forced youthful smiles. . .until I want to scream,
“I don’t belong here! I’m too young for this! I can do it myself, thank-you-very-much!”
I want to be anywhere but here. So I decide to be a rebel. My body might be betraying me, but my mind and will are as sharp and strong as they were when I was twenty. Slowly, so no one can think it is a deliberate mutiny, I shut off outward communication. Sometimes I close my eyes to better concentrate on my secret identity, shutting out any interference interrupting my inner subconscious productions. I am always the star, the main character. I can be anyone I want to be: a famous actress, a pioneer forging a new path for mankind, a Nobel peach prize winner, or a variety of other heroines. But mostly, I reach down inside my memory box to scenes of bygone days when I am young in body, repeating plays of my past. My keepers tiptoe around me, then, thinking I am asleep, and if a frown or smile briefly touches my lips, they are none the wiser.
There are no intruders in my make-believe world, not antiseptic smells, no flashing “help me” lights, no squeaky shoe steps on shiny mopped floors, no disappointing visitor hours. Residents’ demands and outbursts are muffled into nonexistence as I travel a road less traveled by, a secret world that is, like a fitted wedding tuxedo, fitted perfectly to my insulated mind.
I inwardly giggle, aware that doctors and nurses are perplexed by my non-responsiveness, and I am finally at peace with it all--for I am not present anymore. I am back in my own home, puttering around in the kitchen, arranging things “just so.” Or I am knitting a scarf of bright colorful yarn for our grandson as I watch the evening news on television, sitting in my worn tilt-back chair. Other times, I am tending to my flower garden, praising God for His awesome creation; or, on vacation in northern Michigan, perched on the end of the dock, the lake’s slow-moving waves washing over my bare feet. Each day is a new adventure of a former event I have lived before, spiced with added condiments of my unlimited imagination.
They say I am comatose now, no longer able to be spoon-fed or manage bodily functions on my own. I can not make my usual transition from pipe dreams to the physical realm any longer, tubes and monitors and connections hooked up to my inert body inhibiting my usual abilities because my inner self does not recognize my outer self. Like an alien’s spaceship idling in the sky, I hover between life and death in a different hemisphere, pausing to decide if I will eventually land or travel upward past unnumbered stratospheres.
My daytime dreams turn into nightmarish visions as I compare this life to the glimpsed magnificence of heaven awaiting my arrival. And I am oblivious to all but the open arms of Jesus, beckoning me Home.
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