A Half Remembered Dream

Her fingers trace a soft line across my hand. Stopping at the ring, she feels the sharp, deep grooves with her nail. Her head rests gently on the pillow, her eyes looking out toward the red-tinted clouds, contemplating the future. A feeling of warmth consumes me as I lie there, committed to etching every breath into my memory. The warmth fades into a numbing oblivion, and I blink.

The wind pierces through the blanket as I lie in the fetal position, overlooking the immense nighttime vista, perched on the shoulder of the Matterhorn. I force a shiver to warm my body as I contemplate the ascent ahead, and the many more needed. The hardships that must be endured so that something worse may not come to pass. I compel my mind to remember the warmth. The stars flicker, and I am awake.

Reality breaks into consciousness. There I lay again, a hose connected to my abdomen in a silent room filled only by the drone of the machine. The cramps, nausea, and fatigue are my companions. Back to dialysis. All that came before now feels like a half-remembered dream.

Days had faded into months, and months into years. Time ran away as I constantly scrambled to exert some influence over the tide that was dragging me toward this inevitability. No matter our methods, no matter our collaborators, or even the resources that were available, we had toiled to create an artificial kidney. But the tools were not suitable for the job. Years laboring for a future we had mistaken for certain.

I had died once before as well. What else can one call the inability to excrete one’s own waste? It is a state of existence that no natural organism could sustain. But life resumed with the donation of my mother’s kidney. I can still remember the anesthesia-induced haze in which they proudly carted me into her room. Yet that kidney had failed.

I sat up in bed and looked around. As blood forced its way through the constrictions in my arteries, a faint sensation came over me. I had been waiting in this state for too long. No longer could such an organ save me. Before, only my kidneys had failed; now it was my whole body.

But I am grateful for that one last chance. If I could taste liberty, it would be the moment I left the hospital, glowing with the sun’s warmth on my skin. I looked toward better worlds with hope, worlds of many possibilities. Yet all those probabilities had still collapsed into this certainty.

Now I take solace in the fact that, in our infinite universe, farther than light may ever reach, there is a version of me that was successful, a version that can walk in step with his children and watch them grow.

—

Let this be that version.