Chapter 1 The room was clean and smelled of antiseptic. She knew that much. She couldn’t see it, but she could smell it. Its odor was so strong at times it burned her nostrils. There was an ever-present sound to the left of her, over her shoulder. She could not place the noise. It seemed to involve air was all she knew. It would push then pull, then push then pull. It had a rhythm to it. For some reason there was a comfort in that rhythm. It seemed that when the pace of whatever it was started going off-beat, an alarm sounded that hurt her ears and resulted in two things happening: voices came within earshot, excited voices, and then she would remember nothing again. Literally, she would remember nothing again. She sensed light at times, and darkness at others. How this was possible? How does one “feel” light or dark? She did not know. She just knew she felt it, and would not be able to describe it to anyone else. It just was. She tried opening her eyes several times, but they would not open. She must be really tired, she thought. She knew she wanted them open, but they stayed shut. Once, once a few days ago she tried opening them and was successful in getting one lid to cooperate just a smidge. There was a brief second, or maybe nanosecond, of real light in the room, but the glare of it forced her lid shut again so quickly, she did not have time to focus or recognize anything. Since then, she had not tried to concentrate on it again. It seemed to sap every ounce of her strength that day, and she was not willing to risk it again. On some days, there were voices in the room, but they seemed to speak a different language. She knew the noises to be words, but was unable to determine what those words were. The voices did not seem to be talking to her anyway, so the mental exercise of translating those words was not important to her except that she was aware of them. Every once in a while a noise that sounded like it was directed towards her was heard, but the truth was, she didn’t recognize either the voice or the words then, either. Maybe she was in some foreign country, or maybe it was just a dream she would awaken from. Her back and her legs felt the almost non-stop movement of something below her. Whatever that was seemed to caress her, then leave, then return again. It was almost as if hands were gently rubbing her skin, moving up and down whatever part of her touched whatever it was that was underneath her. It felt good and was a relaxing feeling. She liked that part. What she didn’t like was the feeling she had that she was naked while all this was happening. For some reason, she felt as if she was suspended, naked. Not that she had ever had that feeling before, or truly knew what it would feel like. But if she had to imagine it, this is what it would be like. Every once in a while someone would come close to her and say, “Cara? Cara?” What was Cara? Or maybe who was Cara? She didn’t know that either. There was really very little she knew right now. Hell, she was not even sure she understood what “knew” meant anymore. This she did know. She was tired. No, it wasn’t so much tired as it was not wanting to participate in whatever was going on around her. She drifted off to wherever it was she would go when she was not “awake”. There it was totally silent, totally dark, and totally safe. As she felt the darkness creeping back in over her, she just surrendered to it. That, after all, took zero energy, which was exactly equal to what she had to give right now. Chapter2 She had finally finished school and now she was going to go back home to Midville, Indiana and hopefully get a job. Nursing school had been harder than she thought. Somehow she thought it would be like high school. . . easy. She was wrong. She thought being free from home would be exciting. Wrong again. But she was done now. There was still a test to take to get certified as an R.N., but she felt confident about that. And back home there was Tim. She was not sure about that. It had been a long time since she was sure about that. She did not look forward to seeing him, but felt a resolution to the Tim issue was in order now. As she waited at the Greyhound terminal for her bus to arrive, she thought about Tim and how their lives had been in the past, and how they were today. Did she dare start this thought process now? She knew from past experience she could get lost in those thoughts. The last thing she wanted to do was miss this bus. As it was, no one could get off work to come and get her today, and so her homecoming was dependent on this bus trip. Four and a half hours on a bus. A very inauspicious ending to an otherwise unremarkable college career. Homecoming. The thought of homecoming brought back memories of her junior year Homecoming at Midville high. It was when she met Tim for the first time. He was handsome, a very outgoing guy. He was a Varsity football player, and everyone liked him. The girls all chased after him. She didn’t want to chase him, and, in fact, did her best to avoid him. At least that’s what she told herself and her girlfriends. They had gone to different middle schools, but there was only 1 high school in Midville and that was when she first saw him. She never had any classes with him, and never had an opportunity to meet him until her junior year. That year she had been convinced by their friends to enter the Homecoming Queen contest. She didn’t expect to win. She wasn’t a cheerleader. She wasn’t what you would call popular. Her family didn’t have money. She was just an average, run-of-the-mill student, never got in trouble, got good grades, had fun with her girlfriends, and had no serious boyfriends. Until Tim. Somehow, that Homecoming Queen contest became a bigger thing than she ever thought it would. Looking back, she was sorry she had ever done it, but at the time, she thought it would be a fun thing to do. She might even get to know some different people in the school. People she wouldn’t normally hang around with. People who had a different circle of friends. She might even meet someone on the football team. She didn’t know many of them at all. Yes, it had seemed like a good idea then. In retrospect, it was not a good idea at all. That whole process of “running” for Homecoming Queen had put her in a different class of people all together. The other girls were prettier, more popular, more catty than she ever thought of being. They were used to this kind of thing. She was not. She tried several times during the race to drop out, but her girlfriends kept her in it. They kept telling her she could do it. So she stayed in. She didn’t win, but the night of Homecoming, Tim, who was Homecoming King, and his current girlfriend, Sherry, who was Homecoming Queen, had a big fight. In the middle of the dance, Tim came up and asked her to dance. She said “yes”, and it would not be the last “yes” she said to Tim in high school, or after high school. That night would be the start of a high school romance that brought her both moments of supreme highs and moments of desperate lows. That night, as he held her close for that first slow dance, and she smelled the beer on his breath, she should have known this was not the person she wanted. Somehow, she got caught up in the whole “football star” thing. Somehow she got caught up in the fact that her dad liked this boy, maybe even more than he liked her, and would sit and talk football to him all day on Saturday. Somehow she lost herself in that year. She was now “the girl who was dating Tim”. She wasn’t Cara anymore. And that’s how it all started. As she sat there thinking, she heard the sound of air brakes as the bus pulled into the terminal and parked right in front of her. There was that familiar double pump of air gushing outwards as the bus pulled in, that unmistakable odor of diesel fuel exhaust. She laughed to herself now, thinking that she was trying not to think too deeply about things at home for fear she’d miss her bus. That was a joke. There was no way to miss the sounds of this bus or its brakes. She grabbed her luggage, checked it onto the bus, watched as the man threw it indiscriminately into the underbelly of the bus, and climbed aboard, hoping for a window seat . . . alone. Well, she got the window seat.
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 22:03:58 +0000
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