Month: December 2024

She didn’t seek it, knowing that at any moment, it could be brutally taken away – unless it was freely and sincerely given.

I shift and accommodate way too much as I seek to adapt and survive.

After the 911 responder seemed to blow off the urgency of her call for a “well check,” she gathered up courage to go talk to the still, supine figure.

“Are you ok?” she called out, unsure if she was doing the right thing.

No response, so she called out a little louder as her nose caught the smell of reeking alcohol nearby somewhere.

“Hey! How are you doing? Hey – are you ok?” she repeated, concerned and kindly.

Barely a stir, so she gently-but-firmly slow-shook the front of his thick-coated left shoulder.

“Hey, come back to the surface!”

His eyes barely slitting open slightly slid in the thick, gooey matrix of his eye water, indicating that his mind and body were engaged in some to-be-taken-seriously kind of shutdown.

As she kept talking loudly to him to get through the haze, his eyes slowly widened, staring at and still registering nothing.

His pupils were dilated, and any of his slight movements attempted conveyed definite system lockdown.

Catatonic was the word that came to mind.

“Do you need help?” she engaged him further, rubbing his chest in circles a bit vigorously.

He slowly reached out with a low-angled, spirit-vacated arm and hand, whispering something.

“What? I can’t hear you,” she stated loud and clearly.

“Can you help me up?” his twenties or early thirties, deeply-tranked voice more loudly rasp-whispered.

So she grabbed his hand and slowly pulled, lifting his corpse-like torso up into a contorted sitting position.

As he wavered upright there, phasing between this and another reality, she began rubbing his warm back, assessing that the reason he was still alive was because he’d found dirt to lie back upon between the sidewalk and wall of the downtown storefront building, instead of hard, heat- and soul-sucking concrete.

Calling 911 again, she insisted that the responder immediately send an ambulence, but the operator still seemed uncommittal, so she practically verbally fought with him as he kept asking what seemed like inane and unimportant questions.

“Listen – he is NOT ok! Get someone down here, immediately!”

“I understand your concern, ma’am, but I am required to ask these questions…” he replied without feeling.

“Well send someone down here in the meantime – why aren’t you taking this seriously?!”

The young man stiffly leaned over to his side, as if he needed to throw up or was getting his bearings.

“Can you help me up?” his voice rasped out a little louder to her.

“I’m not sure that that’s the best thing for you…” she worried.

“But I need to use the bathroom now,” he slur-countered – so she took his upraised, limp hand and leaned back, gently helping to pull his too-light, corporeal form upward while continuing to insist that 911 send a medic.

As they went slowly toward the alley with him sway-wobbling to just slightly within it, she guided him to some garbage cans to wedge between them for support, his front aimed toward the shadowed wall for privacy in doing his business.

After a few moments, he blearily asked for help attending to his zipper.

“You gotta do it yourself, hon,” she asserted. “That’s not my job to do it for you.”

But she stayed to the side behind him and helped wrestle his sleeve up to beyond his recessed hand so that he could reach forward and take care of things more easily.

Eventually, young women police on-foot and the fire department with a medical unit arrived on the scene.

They began questioning the young man and she asked if she was further needed – then went to wait in her car because it was blocked from behind by emergency vehicles flashing brilliant pulses of colored, intense lighting.

Keeping her awareness open, she could tell in short time that they were all just going to leave him there – and got quickly out of her car to go advocate further for him.

“Hey!” she said to the response team officer in lead. “He asked me to call an ambulance. I wouldn’t have called you if this wasn’t a serious emergency! He had no movement, extremely delayed response, and no presence of any conscious awareness in his eyes that could barely open!”

The lead officer gently and inclusively reassured her: “Ma’am, there is no harm in your calling for help. In fact, that’s always the right thing to do…” he affirmed.

“So you’re just gonna leave him here?” she asked, incredulously.

“He doesn’t want our help, now. We’ve tried to help him before, and he’s just walked out of the hospital.”

The officer shrugged his shoulders in a way that conveyed understanding of the sad difficulty of the situation.

She returned to her car as everyone packed back up to go, and the young man returned to where she had initially found him: the pieces resetting the board until another round of play was to be had in the sure-to-be near future.

Once in her car, she felt a tickle on her right arm that had lifted and helped guide the young man – as if something tiny and quick was determinedly skittering upward.

Then, she felt her right eyebrow hairs shift, as if something was crawling surreptitiously in between them.

Oh crap!

Did she just pick up some lice from this situation?!

Frustrated, confused, and nonplussed by the whole event, she drove home, briefly pulling into the middle lane between traffic directions, as if turning, while she stopped with the turn signal on and just let the crowding traffic pass by until it thinned.

Then, she pulled back onto the main road and soon arrived and parked crookedly in her own driveway.

To shake out the shock, and freaking out just a bit, she exclaimed out loud sardonicly, “I’d rather have just gone to that movie!”

As she wondered if she needed to be ashamed for her stressed-out statement, she reflected that maybe she had saved a life tonight because she had gotten the young man up again and moving.

I had not factored into the equation that a huge block to my expanding further into music and sound production is that since I am no longer enrolled in classes, I no longer have access to (nor can afford) the software needed to perform these projects!