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.

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And I don’t give a damn that Gail remarried. Hell, if she’d had her lights put out like I did mine, I’d probably have done the same in half the time. I don’t even care that the fucker looks just like me, living my life in my house, raising my kids, or whoever the fuck they are. I just don’t, so don’t think I do. I know it’s you who sent the shrink, but don’t think I need one for that. No sir.

But for the love of Christ, you gotta help me out, doc. I’m drowning here. It’s not just them, it’s the world. I read this article yesterday by some geezer bitching about people being glued to their phones, but how can you blame them? Those things do fucking everything! Shit, if I could watch the game, pay my bills, download porn and film myself doing it in 5 minutes, then what the hell do I need anything else for?

For what it’s worth, doc, I appreciate what you’re doing here. The whole keeping me afloat, life is precious shtick. I get it. But ten years of life support, it isn’t peanuts. Who the fuck is gonna pay for that? It sure ain’t me. It sure as shit ain’t Kid Vicious the daughter-fucking wonder, either. Not a chance. I don’t even wanna see the bill, you’d need a whole wing of shrinks to get me through that one.

Can’t you bring me back, doc? For Christ’s sake, the cars drive themselves, have they not managed time travel yet?

Are you leaving? Well, that’s fine.

Tell me, can you smoke in hospitals again?

No?

Sweet Jesus, I hate it here.

Matt Surface was born in Brooklyn, New York and works in the fields of healthcare and biomedical research. He has published several manuscripts in scientific journals, as well as opinion essays in the New York Daily News, and Welcome2theBronx, the largest independent blog and news site in The Bronx.