Literary Work
One Giant Leap Matt Surface
You know, you’re about the fiftieth person who’s asked me that. About how it felt. It’s a special form of madness you all have, asking the same question, expecting a different response. The closest I can think of is when you’re napping in the middle of the day. The kind when it’s just after work, you’ve got a while before dinner, and what the hell kind of hurt is a little shuteye gonna do? Then BOOM, you wake up three hours later, shit scared, and feeling the closest to a pile of garbage a man can get. If you want to know, if you need to know, that’s the best I got. Shit, how would you feel? Dozing through a whole ten years of your life? One moment you’re at your son’s little league game, jumping up and down with his twin sister in the stands, and the next you’re staring down a foul ball
screaming toward your head? Fast-forward a decade, and you’re in a hospital, you don’t know left from right, and your two kids, your babies, ain’t fucking babies no more, not to mention your wife’s got another man’s rock on the finger where yours used to be, because who the hell comes out of a ten-year coma lucid, let alone living? Now just how would that sit with you, doc? You wanna know how it felt? Like waking into a fucking nightmare. Everyone’s so happy, so glad that daddy’s back in action, returned from vegetable-death-limbo, and God must I be just thrilled to live and tell the tale? But I’m not, okay?! I’m just fucking not. Do you know what it’s like to lose your family? I don’t mean it literally, of course, but you gotta understand doc, they’re not the same people. My kids couldn’t even do long division and now they’re grown. Drinking age. Shit, they could up and join the armed forces if it tickled their fancies. Imagine, my son didn’t know his ass from his elbow and now he’s studying law at one of the top universities in the state. And my daughter, God bless her, she only cared about boy-bands and bubble tea, and now she’s shacked up with some scrawny fucker in a punk band who couldn’t look you in the eyes unless you taped a pair of joints to them. Say what you want, run all the genetic tests you’ve got in this fluorescent dungeon, but I’m telling you, those ain’t my kids.
cassettebleue
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