Awake, I

A Story by Tom Bombidail

My travels across the country. A year in the making. Part one.

I’m awake now, awake enough to tell part of my story, sober enough to keep track of it, and vigilant enough to stay alive. I left with thoughts on a rusting piece of parchment somewhere deep in my mind. A blade used to whittle away the fears of ineptitude and uncertainty. Blind and tumbling I bound into an expanse of blue skies and clear water.

The journey began in a twisted thicket. This dark place behind a computer desk and a head set. We were ones who preyed on the sick and dying. We were those who profited from our elder’s sickness. We told ourselves we were there to help. We told those elders we were selling life. Leaches and ticks, the lot of us.

So I broke my chains and fled to the woods without a plan or a care. I only knew I could no longer be one who targeted the weak and dying.

Demons followed. They haunted my every footstep. They siphoned my breath. They sapped my sapience. They stole what I held most dear. My mind was robbed.

My thoughts were scattered and my spirit broken. In the woods I thought I had found salvation, but I overstayed my welcome.

Days passed. Those days turned to weeks. Every night I clutched a bottle, spooning with it as if it could replace companionship. For so long I tried. I tried to substitute humanity with these substances.

Just as my energy waned, a man offered me a job. He offered me slavery, yet I happily marched into the maw of that terrible machine. A machine made of metal painted bright colors. Its teeth the shape of horses undulating up and down. Its feet were rubber. Its blood, well, I was a cell.

I circulated through this machine’s cold steel for three long weeks before I escaped. But I found myself lost again. Lost in a new strange place, far from any home I had ever known.

Long nights were spent under fluorescent lights, and the days filled with biting insects.

Until someone found me. A helping hand extended from another, kinder machine. This machine had rubber feet as well, but I was no longer a cell. I became an organ. I became the muscle fiber that propelled the machine thousands of miles.