 I believe at some point in our lives we all reach rock bottom, or so we believe when life doesn’t go the way we wish for. Some of us experience rock bottom many times, and later in life we realize that the bottom can still be deeper than we can imagine. You might once have thought you hit rock bottom when your mom told you “NO” to buying that one expensive toy that you saw in the commercials, and start crying and thinking that life can never get worse than this. And some of you might be the moms and dads, who are hardly making do with the little you’ve got to survive, and now you have to deal with your young kid’s attempt to have his, or her way with you. This is a story of how I reached, let’s say, a rock bottom, where I thought I was digging myself out, only to realize that I almost buried myself in. I just turned thirty years old in 2015. My birthday gift from the family was a new smart phone, and an envelope with some cash from my parents and my siblings. Happy day, right? Not how I felt about it. Now you might think that me reaching my third decade in life might be the reason why I wasn’t happy, but that’s not the case, I actually like growing up. I always joked about how I can’t wait to have some grey hairs sprinkled around my head. “That will attract the ladies” I always joked. I’m thirty-six now, and still not a single grey hair on my body, and I am happily married, so I kissed the ladies’ magnet fantasy goodbye and moved on. The reason why I was depressed was because I have been jobless for a year. I was living with my parents, and for some unknown reason, I was coughing blood months before my birthday. Now the first two problems can happen to many - unfortunate how it may be - but the last one was not only a terrible thing to have, but also a mystery to everyone. You see, no one knew why I was coughing blood. They did all the blood works, all the chest X-Rays, and CT scans. All they could tell is that there are some radiolucencies in all the images they took of my lungs, but they couldn’t seem to find the cause. TB was ruled out, which one might think it’s a good thing. But my brain just announced that I reached rock bottom, thinking that not knowing the reason was much worse. Insomnia was just the cherry I needed on top of the pile of messy cake life have handed to me. And just like those fellas in The Sleep Experiment, I turned feral on my family and friends, and slowly became excluded. I became lonely, and that’s when thoughts of – you know what- creeped in my head. And for a writer like me, who writes fiction most of the time, I could get really creative with how I would do it to myself. One day, I lay down on my bed, not alone, my pal insomnia is with me, making sure I stay awake. I started to imagine… it. I was day dreaming about it for weeks, but that was the first time I am thinking of ending it all while I’m on my bed, and then it became all I can think of. I told myself: “It’s okay, I’ll never really do it… no harm in imagining it… it’s just imagination… thoughts can’t hurt.”. Now I know you, who are reading this, might be shaking your head, and thinking, this won’t end well… you don’t know the half of it. I was tired, but I still couldn’t sleep. This can affect what you imagine at a moment like that, so I couldn’t imagine myself running in a highway trying to avoid the incoming cars until I check out like a deer, or I couldn’t imagine casually climbing an alligator’s cage and throw myself in; doing a double front flip before I go down under and never resurface. I was tired, and I wanted to sleep. Sleeping pills. The words flashed in my head. I remember moving my hands to my mouth, and pretending to swallow a handful of sleeping pills. I’m not sure if a handful is enough, I’m not an expert, and I don’t ever wish to be so, but it was enough for my brain to imagine myself slowly losing all myself to the void. The next day I woke up, not realizing when did I fell asleep. It was the first time in a while where I felt I had a good night sleep. I found a way to sleep. I finally found a way to sleep. I remember thinking how much I looked forward to the next night to come so I can do it again. I felt like I have solved one of my problems, and that made me believe that… maybe… everything will be alright. I did it again the second night, and this time, I went into a deeper state of sleep. I only woke up in the afternoon when my mom came to me to see if I was alright. I slept for sixteen hours that day. I thought that this was a blessing, albite I felt a little lethargy from the extended sleep, but I thought I earned that because I haven’t slept right for months. Tonight, I thought, I will have the best sleep ever. Seven hours later, I went back to my bed. I lie down on my side, pillow between my thighs. I chug two handfuls of imaginary sleeping pills, and then, slowly, my body started to sleep… my body started to sleep… not my brain… my body. Everything was shut down except for my consciousness. I was able to feel the passage of time, and for a moment, I thought that this trick I convinced myself works, wasn’t going to do it anymore. More time passes, and I thought this might be insomnia again, telling me: “Hey! Ahmed! Guess who’s back from vacation?”. As time continued to pass, I started to wonder if my eyes were closed, or if it’s the room that was too dark. Of course, I could easily test that by opening and closing my eyelids, which for some reason, I didn’t feel was happening. I tried to rub my eyes, and when I say tried, I mean I summoned every ounce of my muscles and tendons to reach out to my eyelids, but I couldn’t feel my fingers touching anything, I couldn’t even feel my hands. A memory flashed before me, where I once slept on my arm until it went numb and I couldn’t move it the next day when I woke up for about fifteen seconds, which later followed by pins and needles that I can only describe as extremely loud TV static noise inside your muscles. I decided to get up and switch sides, but I couldn’t move, I couldn’t feel anything. I tried to move my fingers, my toes, my tongue, even tried wriggling like a freshly caught fish, but there’s nothing. I tried to speak, but there was no mouth, no lips, no tongue. I then tried to take a deep breath… nothing… I couldn’t breathe. You might have been in an extreme state of fear at some point in your life. Fear can be described as some kind of pressure that can be released through our human reactions; like a shout, or a gasp, or you might turn the other way and run for your life. Me, however, in that state of tormented, agonizing fear, could not scream, run, or even faint. I couldn’t react to what is happening, and that made my fear build-up as I became convinced that I was dead. Somehow, I am dead… and conscious. I turned religious, remembering the times I heard that after we die, we will be buried until judgement day, which could be countless eons from now. Am I going to stay like this, just a conscious in the dark for hundreds, thousands, millions of years from now? Isn’t judgement day in the heavens? Is judgment day going to be in our galaxy? The closest galaxy is two million light years away from us. AM I GOING TO STAY LIKE THAT FOR BILLIONS OF YEARS? “Don’t pull” I suddenly heard in the darkness. I wanted to ask “who is it?”. I tried to shout or wave. But I was a paralyzed, bodiless victim in the pitch blackness of my doom. “Don’t pull” Pull what? What are you talking about? Who are you? What is happening? I replied in my mind. It was the only way I could answer. Then, out of the darkness, a hideous creature, something I could not comprehend, manifested in front of me. It had a face similar to a lion, but it was covered in scales you’d see on oceanic creatures, That’s the best way I can describe its continence. Its body, even though it had hands and legs, diverted from anything close to being human, or anything earthly. I felt everything shaking around me as it got closer to me, it’s eyes bright, but not glowing, as if there was an invisible light reflecting on them. And all around it, there was some kind of smoggy vapor, and I knew, without being able to smell, that this almost smoky halo evaporating from it, was the stench of death. “Don’t… I took a swing at it out of fear. It looked shocked at me. Then, slowly, the face of this cosmic humanoid, oceanic lion started to morph into a familiar face; my brother’s, who came to wake me up, and is now in shock after I punched him on the face. I looked at him for a while, and then I started crying. He took me out for lunch that day and I talked to him about what happened. We snuck out, so no one would see me in that state. He never mentioned what happened to me to anyone. This is the first time I’ve ever revealed that dreaded night, and I hope I will never live through it again. The power of imagination is stronger than we think, so if you ever reach rock bottom, just remember, it can always get worse, and most certainly, do not imagine taking the easy way out, for imagination has a way of manifesting itself if we let it. You might be at rock bottom now, but you will eventually be on top of the world another day. Bonus information: When I met my wife, I learned that during the time I was mysteriously coughing blood, that she was diagnosed with TB, and when she was cured, I stopped coughing blood. That was three years before we met…. Weird. Harvest Nights |
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