For Nikki

For Nikki.
They used to write me bad poetry and sing me stupid songs, while we looked out at dusty red sunsets, over musty red train-cars, sitting on rusty red train-tracks. They sounded nice sometimes. Before the songs, we just stared. They stared at me, I stared at them, we stared at the hospital wall. They didn’t care, I didn’t care, so we just sat together, in one big cluster-fuck of not caring.
Do you remember your first day of school? No, that’s OK, probably not important, probably not worth remembering, you [probably] just ate paste in the back of the classroom anyway. I was a fucking genius though. I stacked those pretty pink blocks, so fucking high. The blocks were sized according to their number value: ten was real big; one was real small, fucking obvious, right? That’s Montessori for you. Pointing out obvious shit, and pretending it wasn’t. I mean you and I both knew ten was fucking bigger than one, we didn’t need no Goddamn pink blocks to tell us that. Shit, I was reading at a third grade level. You were {probably} off eating paste though, don’t worry about it, happens to the best of us.
In first grade I stole some books from the library, I know, I’m a rebel, right? I remember looking at the glossy covers, and the little numbers on the spine, and the bright fluorescent letters on the cover. So I just grabbed a book, and ran, ran through the stupid “sharing circle” ran through the front door, and out to recess. I was making my way across the Minnesota Wisconsin border when they finally caught me. I did hard time, five days, cleaning up the lunchroom instead of going out to recess. Fuckers. They must have known about the foursquare tournament going on that week.
Have you ever been cold? Like, really, absolutely, fucking-freezing. Yeah? Doubt it, you ate paste, remember? You don’t know what cold is. I sure do. In the 5th grade, my family went to Glacier Park, going back to nature’n’shit, and my dad, brilliant as he was, decided we should camp on a glacier. Yeah, a fucking glacier. That takes balls, and I was eleven, so fuck that, puberty was still three years off. Any way, dad is pitching the tent, and I’m off taking a piss, and I slip off a fucking rock, and tumble into a crevice. I’m fucked, right? Nah, you’re forgettin, I’m a genius, you ate paste, go fuck yourself, I’m gonna crawl out of this ice canyon. So for like, three, six, eighteen hours, I try to haul myself out of this huge, fuck-off ice hole, while wearing a windbreaker that’s two sizes too small [hand-me-downs, they’re a bitch]. By the time dad found me I was shivering my ass-off, laying down in a pile of snow trying to remember how the fuck I got down there in the first place. Three helicopter rides, and a short ambulance trip later; I’m lying face up in some sterilized, heated, pansy-ass hospital, counting ceiling tiles. Least, they could have done was turned on the T.V., I hadn’t watched pokemon for three days, and Ash was in the middle of fighting Sabrina, this creepy-ass chick who used psychic pokemon to fuck with pikachu. Who the fuck wants to miss that for a camping trip, I sure as hell didn’t. So there I was stuck in this hospital, staring at the ceiling, vaguely hearing the adults talk about amputations, and severe frostbite, and life-altering head traumas. All I wanted was for them to take the IV out of my fucking arm, and the tube out of my nose, so that I could sit up a little and maybe watch a little television. Is that so fucking hard? Long story short, I finally decide to tell them this little jewel of wisdom, and Lo and behold, I lose my ability to speak. I then tried to tell my caretakers about this life-altering change by waving my arms and etc, only to discover that I couldn’t move shit, and that several fingertips were missing. Well fuck-adoodle-doo, no pokemon for me.
You ever write some bad poetry? I mean real bad, like soppy bullshit love poems that you write to yourself after your first girlfriend breaks up with you? Ah, fuck it I know you do, you ate fucking paste as a kid. Point is, when you can’t move, and can’t talk, all the sudden people decide that what you could really use-instead of some T.V., or maybe a little peace and quiet-is a shitty poem, or-even worse- a shitty poem sung to a shitty little tune. You hear about four or five of those, and you start wanting them to pull the plug. There was this one lady though, I think she was a nun, who came kinda often, and used to read me love poems by some dead old guy: and man, oh man, that shit was so beautiful it could knock you off your ass, and make you think that love was nothing but flowers, and heartbreak. Fuck, maybe it is.
This other guy, think he was doctor, used to come in and just start talking. He would ramble on and on about who-fucked-who, why his wife was leaving him, baseball, the current arrangement of his golf clubs, the weather, my vital signs, and any other shit that popped into his head and God it was so Goddamn boring that I thought that if I willed it hard it enough I might just spontaneously combust and end it all. After a while though, I got pretty good at blocking out the boring conversations, and letting in the good ones. For whatever reason that nun, I think Alice was her name, decided that I still needed an education, despite the fact that I couldn’t talk or move. If I had been able to, I probably would have told her that I was a fucking genius that could stack blocks, read at a third grade level, and swipe books from the library, and maybe then she would have said: “fuck it, lets watch pokemon”, but no. I had to learn. So day in and day out she sat down and read shit to me, Poe, T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, and Orwell to name a few, and some of it was pretty good, but really I just wanted her to leave so that I could look at the specks on the wall in silence.
You ever been bored? I mean maybe it’s summer, and your sitting there, and it’s like sixty, seventy-thousand degrees outside, and your mom just stopped you from burning ants on the sidewalk, and now your stuck inside, and you can’t watch T.V. ‘cause mom just shot that one down too, and your just sitting, in your cotton polo, and elastic dress shorts; just covered in boredom, absolutely saturated in it, smothered in a delicious marinade of boredom, drenched by the torpid odor of it. Now imagine that, every day, for three years. Yeah, fuck Glacier Park, and the coma it gave me. So after like a year and a half of listening, I just said fuck it, and stopped. I didn’t hear shit, for a while, I thought that I wouldn’t be able to ever listen again. Like when you haven’t ridden your bike all winter, and you take it out, and your just not sure that you can ride it anymore, that was me, with listening. So I spent a lot of time thinking. Thinking about fingertips, and gloves, and grabbing baseballs, and wearing baseball gloves, and after another year and a half of that, I finally just snapped, and realized that I couldn’t take the boredom any more and that was the day I woke up.
If you ever wake up from a coma, do it at like four in the morning, when no one is there, that way your family doesn’t hug you, and people don’t give you flowers, or prayers. If you wake up at four in the morning chances are you can do what you want, maybe finally turn on the T.V., or scratch your balls or something. But me, I was stupid and woke up at like three in the afternoon on Easter Sunday, what the fuck was I thinking. Anyway, the whole family was there and they were crying, and I was crying, and we were all just crying in a cluster-fuck of required happiness, and God, it would’ve made for a beautiful hallmark card. Then we went home, and never talked about it again. And I remember thinking: Damn, it’s good thing I’m a genius, otherwise I would have been so bored in that coma. Moral of the story: don’t eat paste when you’re a kid. Oh yeah, I forgot, looks like you already fucked that one up.

-Cedric