Chapter 7 – Reborn

This is it.

The afterlife.

The world swirls around me. My life flashing before my eyes in reverse 3D glory. Playing backwards through long lonely hours lost in the black screen. Waiting for something to happen. Back to when I had a life. When I had friends. Before the Hotel. When I had something real to live for.

What was it? What did I have to live for?

University was a bum rush of drinking and drugs, sexy women and erotic excitement, adventure and mistakes, all piled into one unending blur of I’m-young-and-will-live-forever-and-hate-myself-so-fuck-you-all-I’ll-do-whatever-I-want.
Then I had crashed out, onto the street, the sidewalk of real life. I don’t know why or when it happened, but the decision had been made. Enough was enough. Enough fun. Enough drugs. Enough sex.

I laugh out loud, then stop myself to listen in silence as my laughter echoes around the stone and steel chamber. Cat calls echo back, shouts of, ‘Who’s sexy laughter is that?’ and ‘Someone’s getting’ some!’ and ‘Yeah and me next!’ Then there were the really rough ones, the ones I had to avoid in the yard if I wanted to keep my anus intact. The evil bastards that had nothing to live for, and therefore had every reason to die, taking you with them in the most horrendous way possible.

I had seen enough beatings to know that some hard bastards are made out of stone, and even if the screws’ sticks and fists and boots crack and broke bloody arms and noses, smashing fingers and knees and elbows, cracking ribs and battering skulls, still these same hard bastards would get up and throw another punch or kick, or if down to their last ounce and unable to grapple, would bite and tear with their teeth, earning themselves a good kick or two in the face. None of them were pretty. But none of that mattered when they came for you. All that mattered was the animal look in their eye. And their desire to ravage you, to tear you a new one with whatever came to hand at the time. And if you fought, you ended up in the infirmary, which was no safe haven, believe you me. Because they paid off the screws, and would come for you there, where you couldn’t resist or fight. Or worse, they would slip something into your meds, or into your drip if you were really in a bad way, and then you didn’t know anything until you woke up on your side or your front, your gown around your hips, back against cold air, and your ass burning like there was a fourteen foot firebrand shoved up it flame-first.

Yet no matter how bad it got, I never wanted to die. It’s amazing what we can learn to live with.

And I never stopped thinking of women, or sex. So I take it back. Back then, I had no idea what I had, had no idea how good I had it. Had no idea of the awful truth that I had rejected so easily, so foolishly.

You can never have enough sex.

What I wouldn’t give for the touch of a woman. Even a rough one. I would settle for any size, shape, age, as long as she was female. It was enough that she had the right anatomy.

Maybe she could save me from the memories that piled up like stones inside my mind, blocking out all light even as the grey institutional walls close in around me.

They say that death row is the worst place you could ever be, and I believe them. No one here cares about their own life. No one here has anything to lose. We are all going to die. And so we treat each other like wraiths, memories of human beings. Less than human. Less than real. Not even alive.

And so it doesn’t matter what we do to one another. No one is left to judge us. We are the judged, the damned, waiting in purgatory for the end. And with that feeling comes’ immense freedom. Freedom I had never dreamed of back in my college days of partying and sex and drinking and drugs and fighting. True freedom. True strength.

Back in college.

Where it all began.

I shouldn’t have left. I can see that now.

It’s so easy to see what we do wrong, after-the-fact. Hindsight being 20/20 and all. I know, it’s a cliché. But it holds true nonetheless. Or maybe because. Yeah, because. Cause and effect. The truth, therefore the cliché. And still the beat goes on.

So if it was wrong, why did I leave? Was I that naïve? (Oh no, here we go again, back to my all-time rhyming friend. Dear god save me from myself, put the old rhyming brain back on the shelf.) What did I care so little about, to have escaped that land of endless fun?

And then it hits me, like a sledge-hammer.

It had been because of a girl. (Aren’t all of the best stories about, or at least because of, a girl?)

I close my eyes and escape down memory’s long lane to the day that I walked out of university, and into the rest of my life.

And for the briefest of moments, the world slipped away, and I am back there, back in my halcyon days.