Three years ago
I wound up in a medically induced coma
for nine days...
Fourteen inches of small intestine
had to be removed...
I was eviscerated, literally, because
perforation of the intestine
made me go septic...
My skin was blue/gray/green...
And she said I was bloated like a Macy's Day Parade float...
*
In that nine days
there were dreams, phantasms,
nightmares, hallucinations,
and more...
I felt like I was jumping back and forth
through time and space...
Experiencing disparate moments
that felt like reality,
but, really, I was hooked up to machines
that were keeping me alive...
I was very nearly dead...
Dying...
*
I can't remember if she saw shapes in clouds,
or dreamt that she saw faces in the clouds...
My father was one of the faces...
And there was an infant,
I think she thought it was my daughter
who had died years ago
from crib death, S.I.D.S., at two and a half months old...
My father had died just a few years earlier
from pancreatic cancer
that was not diagnosed soon enough...
I think she told me
that they sent me back to this life
because there were still things
that I had to do...
That, on some level, I had died,
but they didn't allow it...
*
Why was I sent back?
What was it that I had to do?
And why was it my father and my daughter?
He never had the chance to meet her in this life...
No one in my family did...
She wasn't here long enough...
And I didn't fight hard enough
to be her father...
Some other man was going to be her Dad,
but she was biologically mine...
I didn't fight for her hard enough...
And if I had
a part of me believes that she would be alive today...
But she saved me...
With the help and counsel of my father...
What was it that they both believed that I would miss
if I had died in that hospital?
*
Some things take years to become more clear...
What could be so important
for this world to need me back in it?
The wife who told me about her vision
had let me die on that hospital bed...
Let whatever love she had left for me
die as if I never woke up...
And that relationship eventually followed suit...
So she was not the reason I was sent back
from my travels
to be in this world...
But I have to believe there was a reason...
The symbolism...
A father's love for his own child...
An infant who didn't live long enough to know
how much I loved her...
*
When I ask what they could have possibly wanted of me...
When I ask what it is they wanted me to be here to experience...
It begins to seem a bit rhetorical...
The particular sequence of events...
Everything that has happened in the three years since
I was sent back into this world...
When I look at where I am today...
It feels like I already know the answer...
It feels, at least, like I am close to that knowledge...
It is something I can touch...
I can feel it growing inside of me...
It feels like it is a living thing...
It is changing my heart...
Changing who I am...
Who I thought that I was...
Nothing else matters if I have figured out their message...
If I am right,
then almost nothing else I have ever done
really matters as much as this feeling...
Nothing matters anymore except for the life that is to come...
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