Remember December
An Introduction
“When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
- Lewis Carroll
“Everything I know, I know because of love.”
- Leo Tolstoy
When I was 12, I was in a house explosion. I spent seventeen days in the hospital my first go-round. My first heart surgery, skin grafts, a minor brain bleed, and many broken bits. Is it all an illusion?
There’s this movie “The Truman Show” starring Jim Carrey, where everyone’s an actor but Truman. His entire life has been fabricated; essentially, it’s a lie. The only one not in on the joke happens to think his life is just perfect, wife, friends, a job, the whole shebang. An illusory experience that everyone outside the town can watch on their television set. (it was the 90’s there were no flat screens)
I used to tell myself after my accident that that was my life. Everyone must be in on it. They must’ve known some grand secret that someday would be revealed to me; there was no way my life could change that quickly in an instant. There was no wake-up; there was just a boom.
I spent the first seven days of my stay in the hospital in a medically induced coma, there was a lot wrong with me, and the easiest way to figure it all out was to make sure I wasn’t moving around, even more so they wanted to keep me out of pain.
While I was under, I remember being on a farm. A bright place. A holding room of sorts. I’ve never dived too deeply into my accident and everyone else's experiences because I just thought everyone was in on it for the longest time. That my life had to be special because who else could something like this happen to? I know my cousins, aunt, and uncle were all involved in the accident as well, but it wasn’t my house. I was staying over for a night and just so happened to sleep on the couch—the worst possible place given where the initial explosion occurred. I went straight up in the air to come hurdling back down towards the ground. To think, at one time, I was really able to fly—my superhero-defining moment. Just I have no cape.
I don’t remember a lot of what happened while I was in the hospital, just bits and pieces. No recollection. Which is probably for the best. Everything else I had to piece together, an investigation of sorts. Playing Clue, but with my own life story. Professor Plum, in the library, with the, what? Match?
The basement had filled with gas, and when the furnace lit, the house blew up. Only the foundation remained. Given the time of year, everyone called it a Christmas miracle. Most of my immediate family spent Christmas in the hospital with me.
But I don’t remember that.
I remember fear. I remember not knowing what was happening. I remember feeling foreign in my own body, a feeling I’ve never been able to shake.
“Remember December” is my path to shaking a feeling I’ve had for fifteen years. Confronting that pain head-on, with those that experienced the pain and suffering right alongside me. I’ve been callous in the way I’ve treated people, especially in regards to my accident. It happened to me, but I wasn’t alone. There were so many people that touched my life in those moments, but I never stopped to think about what they experienced, and this will be my repentance.
Over the next couple of months, I will continue to write “Finding My Feet” publicly and online. But the frequency of my postings will be slowing down as I focus more on my first novel. I will be following the story of my mother through my accident. Through her struggles to get me better. And through the fallout that happened all around us because of something none of us could have ever prepared for.
The world can be a scary place. But it doesn’t have to be. It’s time to face my fear head-on. It’s time for us all to be able to heal.
It’s been long enough.
