Over & Over We Die One After the Other...

Waterloo, London. (now demolished)



I found myself up high inside a building with large clear windows set in brilliant white walls. There were faint but obvious nurse like beings in my peripheral vision. The floor was thickly carpeted and dirty. Plenty of light filled the small corridor I was currently shuffling towards at the far end of the room. With just one thing in my thoughts that ate away at my insides like a hungry fire...........I had come here to die! I was dying! I had just minutes of my life left to live & I was here to say goodbye! My Mum was there by the entrance to the corridor. She had been waiting for me. Face down now & unable to look up I approached the corridor. My Mum followed me behind. I noticed the floor of which was made up of a gentle slope not unlike a wheelchair ramp. I used the metal hand rails on each side of the narrow passage to help me up into what turned out to be the very top floor of the building. The nurse-like beings stayed behind at the bottom of the slope. This new room was even brighter than the one from which I had just left. I saw an excersise bike by one of the large windows that covered the walls. There was a woman sitting on it. She was unfamiliar to me. She was pedaling along and almost out of breath. She looked very ill and I had to look away.
I could see the wind was blowing hard from the way the leaves scratched their pathetic little lives across the sodden ground outside from which they had been born. It was bright and damp out. The room was filled with a fresh draft that was coming in through one of the windows. In the middle of the room was what looked like a lift shaft enclosed inside four concrete walls. The lift was not in use. I noticed that one of the windows overlooking the leafy dance floor outside stretched from the ceiling right down the wall and ended at the thick dirty carpet. The excersise bike was set right next to the window. The woman on the bike had gone now. She had died. I didn't notice where she had been taken........she just wasn't there anymore. There were dead leaves piled up at the base of the exercise machine. I could smell the decay of the little damp pile. As I approached the bike I showed my Mum a knot tied in the waist of my pyjamas and as I fumbled around with the knot I told my Mum that all I had to do was pull on it and I could go now......be dead.....gone.
I decided to hang on a little while so I could at least say goodbye properly. I climbed onto the bike and felt the saddle was still a little warm from the strange woman before. The grips were warm & sticky too. The glassless window by my side seemed much larger than it was and my stomach was filled with heavily depressed butterflies. I began to pedal. I found it very hard going and noticed that my teeth were beginning to fall out and fill my mouth with rotten fragments. My Mum asked me if I wanted a drink of alcohol. She said it would be fine to drink as I would be gone soon. I said yes, I would like a drink. I felt with my tongue that my teeth were crumbling inside my liquid filled mouth. I started to spit them out onto the floor........I had no more room inside my mouth for them. My Mum bent down and picked up the wet bubble soaked chunks. As she sorted through them cupped inside her palm with her fingertips, she said that they weren't my teeth! Then I noticed that indeed they weren't my teeth, as I could now feel my teeth in the space where the rotten ones were. I continued to cycle but just couldn't match the previous womans speed or distance! I would now die as a result of this failure! My heart sank down through the building and through thousands of miles of rock and lava to the center of the earth! I climbed off the bike and stood by my Mums side and I put my hand in hers and I said - "I will be gone in a minute Mummy". I didn't take my eyes off the dark, garish pattern printed into the carpet.
We were both very sad and the pain in out chests excruciatingly permanent. I cried, my face contorted into some kind of agonising pre-death mask and said that I wanted to go now. Hand in hand my Mum walked by my side as I shuffled over to the opposite side of the room past the central column. It turned out to be a mirror image of the side of the room I had just left. The bike, window & the leaves were all present. There was even a little pile of broken teeth on the carpet at the foot of the exercise bike. To my great astonishment my youngest Sister Tania was sitting in a small chair by the bike and the glassless window. Leaves around her bare feet covering her toes. I was very surprised to see her here and shuffled up to her and said that I was ready now. I also explained to her, as I shuffled into place under the window, that I was just here with Mummy telling her about the knot on my pyjama bottoms and all I had to do was pull on it and I would be gone. I found myself crying even more and wailed like a child crying in their sleep. I think I pulled the knot...



Jason






(C) JPT 2007