Growth

This time the tests would require four vials. It wasn’t the first time I had been in for a blood draw, they happened semi regularly. This time was strange though. Usually, these appointments were in and out. A few minutes of interruption in my day to take a small vial of blood from my arm. Today’s wouldn’t take too long either, I assumed. Most of my time would be sapped up waiting for a nurse to be available. I had grown bored of this song and dance. No. Wait. That isn’t accurate. I had grown bored of being unwell. Hospital visits marked my calendar like sporting events that I had the displeasure of being the star player in.

A heavy haze weighed on my body and seeped through my muscles. It has been like this a lot lately. Intense fatigue that bit through my tendons making my limbs limp and useless. Fatigue that turned life from vibrant hues into a dull sludge. It had been an uphill battle to even leave bed this morning. The chill of the waiting room crawled up my arms like frost. I missed when I would work that chill away sketching, mind filled with vivid imagery rather than headaches. As the bitter taste of light headedness flooded my tongue, I leaned against the wall and sunk to the floor. The world around me felt drowned in a thick fog made up in my own mind. My eyes blankly stared ahead at the florescent lights. I didn’t have the energy to care. Machinery gently sung their quiet humming to me throughout the building. The ventilation’s fans joined in their choir. I let the numbing melody ease my eyes shut as boredom swirled into my fatigue, making a rather unappealing mixture.

It was a glint of gold in my mind’s eye that cut through the dullness. Its gaze followed the trail. Ichor. A golden and slick blood like substance. The metallic liquid was painted in splatters against the floor and dripped down a looming figure which seemed to glow in a sharp blue-white light that flooded the room and blinded the eyes. The synthetic gleam shone out from dazzling wings. They stretched out bold from their owner, making the towering figure monumental in stature. Golden blood seeped out from in between the ice blue feathers, similar plumage littered the floor. The angelic features of the figure seemed almost holographic in nature. If you reached your hand out to touch them, you might just phase through. It stood adorned in white armor with ornate golden trim. To tell where the trim ended, and the slick ichor began would be a Sisyphean task as more bled from cracks in the plating.

It felt like the room should be silent. Chilled air bringing a stillness to it. A cathedral hall. Something divine.

It wasn’t.

Instead, it was filled with a mechanical whirring. The sound of fan blades and the hum of electricity. Gentle snaps of gears turning and clicking into place echoed throughout the dark hall. A static charged sense of life was a shock against the sterile nature of the building it filled. The echo of a hall meant for choirs and hymns made the source of the sounds difficult to find. Unless… Oh.

The figure that stood at the center of it all had yet to move, outwardly at least. A careful ear could pick out that the sounds came from inside of it. An even more careful eye could glimpse between the armored plating wires and tubing. That is if you could see past the florescent glint of the figure in the first place.

Crackling through the air, from the unknown, a voice thundered out, “You are broken. Something is wrong.”

The humming of a computer’s processor grew more notable. If a machine could sound stressed, this would be the sound it made.

“You are-“ The machine played the voice back. The sound was static filled and scratched against the ear. ‘-Wrong”

It spoke by cutting up the sentences it heard, playing them back in a new order. The bright wings flared out in defiance, only for their cold light to momentarily flicker. A grinding noise came from the figure as it suddenly moved. Its arm gripped at its own side, almost as if it were pained, but who would believe in a machine’s pain? A chime came from it and-

“-We are ready to see you now,” A soft and warm tone rang out.

It was my mother’s hand on my shoulder and the nurse’s voice which broke me from the daze. I glanced up at the nurse who was waiting for me and blinked the bleariness from my eyes. The sound of doctors’ office computers and ventilation fans greeted me in a way much like the machine from my daydream. I stood from the floor and nodded to the nurse with a smile for the formalities. Another day. Another appointment.

Though, my thoughts snagged on the left-over edges of my daydream. It stung somewhere I couldn’t quite place. A place medicine couldn’t easily heal. As I spoke with the nurse, she had a charming, playful laugh. I should be in school. Oh, how she missed the early years of youth. She didn’t know that I missed it too.

When I got the results, the blood tests lead me back to the doctor’s office a few days later. What they were checking for wasn’t there. Mystery symptoms on the other hand remained steady. This led them to more and more tests. If it wasn’t my nutrition that was causing my weakness, then it could’ve been something more serious. The tests passed by in a haze. Doctors talked at me and my mother, and I blinked and nodded in response. I could barely focus on what they had to say. The only notable thing was the pounding in my head. This dance of tests and talks happened up into the next week, where they sat me down in a sterile white room and looked at me with sad eyes. They told me I was sick. Not in the same way as the flu, but in the way that someone with a stomach that won’t digest things or a leg that won’t move was sick. The shock didn’t hit me like cold water. My world wasn’t shattered like glass. No. To my ears the news was the rhythm of the end time drums. Bang, bang, banging to the beat of my flawed heart.

The air was cold as it blew through my coat on the walk back to my mother’s truck. My head still hurt. Apparently, that was because of my illness too. Of course it was. We didn’t say a word to each other as we walked back. Even if we had, the wind was so loud it would’ve taken it away. The day seemed fuzzy as I sat down in the truck, and I didn’t want to think about it. Thinking about it meant facing the way my life fell through my fists like sand. People say answers are reassuring. That they are supposed to be comforting. Liars. Answers meant that I couldn’t just sleep this off and wake up fine again tomorrow. That the pencils poking at me from my pockets were just memories of when I used them. Memories of when I could.

As I leaned my arm against the window, I let my eyes fall shut. The truck starting up was muffled around me by my daze. The window was freezing. I swore I could hear someone trying to speak to me, but I couldn’t hear as I lost myself in thought. Maybe intentionally choosing to dream rather than think. Or maybe I was too tired to try.

Cracked stone bricks made a floor which was ice cold to the touch. The air stung with frost. Collums lined the walls, stained glass windows let in a dim and dirty light. No pews lined this hall. Dirt gathered in piles against the corners. In the center of the hall the same angelic machine sat knelt. Its knees bloodied with ichor which stained the stone. Head bowed in a prayer; it looked like it was pleading.

The only light to fill the room was that of a bitter winter’s day. The back of the figure was cracked and broken where wings once met the armor. Gaping wounds revealed gears and wires. Tubing which pumped this thing’s blood throughout it snagged on jagged edges. Ichor flowed down its body pooling at its legs. It no longer glowed on its own. Light ripped from it. Then again, its light seemed awfully dim back when it did have its wings. Was it even that bright in the first place? It was getting harder to remember.

“Useless. Fallen thing,” The howl of wind turned into sharp syllables, “Does it yield? Does it understand the cost? Hell bound, pathetic thing.”

Rumbling came from deep within its chest as its gears and pumps worked overtime to account for the damage. The humming was deep and unsteady. It would hitch and pause. The groan of metal as it shifted filled the room. It didn’t look proud anymore. It didn’t sound proud. Its defiance having died out somewhere with its light.

“Hel-p,” The chopped audio came worse than before.

It lifted its head to look up towards the nothing. The wind raced outside the windows, but spoke no more. The machine was alone. Scrap left to decay. The hands of the figure reached to try and gather the pieces that had fallen off of it. A ticking began, clicking with the sharp movements of the machine.

“Did you hear what I just said?” My mother’s voice called out as I lurched forward with the break of the truck.

The clicking of the turn signal struggled to be audible over the winter wind. I glanced over to her, then back out the window. The cold light was kinder than the bite of weather it was paired with.

“No, sorry,” I spoke half-hearted as my words dripped with a bone aching tiredness.

“We need to figure out what we’re going to do about this diagnosis. You know, it’s probably why you’re so tired all the time,” A sigh followed her concern filled words, “You’re going to fail at this rate.”

I let the sting of the words be numbed by the freezing light of day. She took my silence as a sign to continue.

“We can ask your teachers for help but working with the school-“

I cut her off, “I get it. I know,” my words came off sharper than I intended.

The rest of the ride home was haunted by a silence so tense you could slice it with a knife. Daydreams wove their threads into my daily life, as fatigue tore my seams. I tried to avoid the bitter taste that they left in my mouth. I didn’t have the energy to argue, much less to change. The sinking feeling that dragged at my mind told me this was unavoidable. My fate as a statistic of those who failed was engraved like murals into stone.

I continued my life as normal when I got home. Whatever this normal was for me. It mostly involved sleeping and staring dreadfully at homework to be done. Abandoned paintings and sketchbooks littered the floor of my room. Looking at them suffocated me. They were reflections of what people expected of me. What I was supposed to be able to do. How was I this helpless? The daydream I had poked and prodded at me. It made me afraid. I felt useless. The days passed by like blinks of an eye. My friends’ lives continued without me. I was left behind. A piece of scrap.

Even so, the dawn that I couldn’t stagnate like this eventually broke on me. It took an effort. First to find motivation. To believe I was not as defeated as I felt. I was no stranger to hopelessness but it felt as if everything were falling away. As the days past I grew more tired. I was tired of the fatigue and tired of being forgotten. I was tired of believing I had lost when I still had legs that could walk and hands that could work. I picked up a pen. If I decided if I were to fail it would be while working to the bone, so no one could say I hadn’t tried. I opened an old and worn sketchbook and scrawled out for the first time in months. I decided that if I were to fall I wanted to do it like a star and not a beast. Ink bled unerasable in defiance. Days which had once passed like hours now felt tangible. No, I would not be erased. I felt robbed of my life and I strove to steal it back.

The hours of trying became days of hard work. My hand wove lines into shapes. Friendships lost and reborn by the tides of time, which I didn’t have much of in my day to spare for those around me. Sometimes, I could only work at my art for 3 minutes at a time. The weeks tumbled forward fast and slow at the same time as I tried to make the moments in them count. Each stroke added depth, not one line was wasted. So incredibly slowly, yet all at once, it felt like the fatigue was lessened. Where there once was a blank page, a full illustration bloomed. I sat in class with a new clarity in front of my eyes and I blinked. My art was tucked gently behind the worksheet I had to complete. In staring at my paper in front of me I realized that I could do this. The chatter of classmates around me was a comforting hum that I was where I was meant to be. I wasn’t on my own, no, I was a part of the whole. I drew my pencil against the assignment, marking answers and rushing ahead of where we were in class. I was already done with today’s paper, and now I scribed the answers to work long past. The scratch of graphite on paper made satisfying sounds, and warm sun came in through the window and onto my desk. I let my mind wander as I completed math problems as if they were second nature to me. I bathed in the heat that coated me thanks to the cloudless day. It was peaceful almost as I lost myself.

Moss crept through the cracks in the stone. Golden sunlight filtered in through the branches of trees. Weeds or maybe wildflowers grew in between the bricks of the floor filling the space with dots of purple, blue, and pink. Dust and dirt coated the ground, yet despite the apparent dilapidation of the building it felt more alive than it had ever been. Vines hung from crumbling walls and shrubbery sprouted out of the corners. The gentle scratch of creatures chittering outside of sight filled the room with a gentle calm. The stone carvings which once scribed the walls with fates of doom were cracked and destroyed.

In the center of the hall knelt an armored figure. White armor stained with browns and greys with dirt and dust. Grand cracks in its back which once exposed wiring and gears were now filled with plants and life. Fungus and moss filled the empty space where wings were once attached. Grandiose hands carefully cradled a small pile of dirt, dark and saturated with nutrients. Its fingers were rough. Almost clawed in shape. Worn metal caked in mud from ripping at the earth. Forcefully removing the stone of the hall to find a place where something could grow. In the dirt a small bright green stem poked upwards. Stretching upwards the plant reached for the rays of sun which glistened above it. Carefully, with the gentle whirring of a machine, the figure set the plant down into the earth. Into a hole in the tiles that had been intentionally broken away.

The once dark halls seemed to become a home. Broken walls and cracks mended with something new. Life flourished from the damage done here. Down the machines back faint trails of ichor still stained it. The plated armor it wore seemed to still find itself with new chips and cracks, yet the brunt of the damage was done. Wear caused by forceful work engraving it with marks of its struggle. The air was warm and calming. A feeling of restless ache still permeated, but it felt purposeful. Glinting in branches and vines, old feathers could be found woven into the nests of birds. The machine now tasked with growing a world which had refused it. How wonderful. How cruel.

Yet there was the quiet crackle of electricity emanating from the machine. Soft whirring alive in its own strange way. Marks around it in the stone showed where it had fought to destroy the cold isolation of the temple. As it stood from the small plant, nested in its home in the floor, the machine got to work, readying a powerful strike to shatter more of the icy stone. Should the cold winds and howling storm return, it would find a shelter of life so dense it couldn’t be heard anymore.

Then, for a moment, the scratch of the wildlife paused, followed by a soft tap. As the machine looked up to see what the matter was, I blinked.

In front of me was a near complete assignment. I must’ve zoned out again. My imagination had grown clearer and more prominent with the ease of my brain fog and the stretch of my creative muscles. The scratching of critters suddenly made much more sense to me as the scratch of the teacher’s pencil against paper. I glanced up to see the room empty outside of us two. Class ended some time ago. It was the last period of the day, and I was gifted room to breathe and catch up after the days end. I remained to finish missing work and make up my grades. Even if they just chipped away at the damage that was done by such a long span of inactivity, each scratch was the start of something. I looked back down to mark the last answer on my sheet and pushed myself out of my desk, stretching as I did. To my surprise, my vision wasn’t met with the usual darkness of lightheadedness and poor blood flow. It was pleasant. In a moment of useless curiosity, I wondered if the machine from my dreams still ached when it moved anymore. Maybe the moss had grown through its joints. Fortified it.

I crept to the teacher’s desk, not wanting to disturb his work as I set the paper down lightly on a stack. When I did, his eyes looked up to meet mine.

“So, you heading home for the day?” His voice casual as it rang out. I nodded in a silent reply, my nerves of being so far behind that I had to stay late to make it up getting the better of me.

“You know, you’ve been doing a lot better lately,” a cautious tension was in his voice. It was hard to place, not quite pity but as if he feared it’d be taken as such. The nervous voice people above you get when you aren’t where you should be, but they know you’re trying. “You’re doing good. Working hard. Though I’d appreciate if you’d draw less during instructions.”

There was a beat of silence after an awkward chuckle before I grinned with my teeth.

“I have a lot to catch up on, now that I’m finally healthier, and I listen better when drawing” I didn’t bother to hide the pride in my voice. Nor did I bother to mask my refusal to quit drawing. I let my stubbornness bleed through to the surface as I spoke.

“You’re making quick work of it, and if you’re sure of that,” he gave an approving nod, though it was followed with a squint as I trailed back to my desk, grabbing my backpack up off the floor with a swing and tucking my sketchbook against my chest.

I waved as I chimed my typical goodbye. Gliding out the door with a newfound confidence and a pep in my step. The illustration in my sketchbook held outward, regardless of who would see. Marks in pens of all sorts of colors painting and a scene of a city sprawled with plants, overgrown and reclaimed. The thought of the plant covered machine crossed my mind. If it could recover, grow, couldn’t I? My life had been torn out of my hands and thrown on its head without my input. It had to have been angry. I was too. Like it I wanted to punch and claw at everything that held me back. Trying to think about what I lost got caught in my throat, and how I would move forward left an ache in my lungs. I just wanted to feel safe, like I could finally rest. I wasn’t ready to face that yet, but something about the turmoil into peace of my daydream felt like a reflection in a pond. Wavey and not quite accurate, but something I could relate to either way. There was still so much work to be done to cultivate that stone hall into a haven. There was still so much work to be done for me to even be able to graduate on time. It was suffocating near endless work. Yet I found comfort in the daydreams. The way work shaped the machines hands into claws yet it could tend to the earth and her children with a tender kindness. I would take the daydreams as they came. I hoped the fear and rage that defined my improvement could become a gentle love. Dreams are a peak into the subconscious right? Maybe I could let them guide me into a better understanding of my own mind. Maybe things would be alright. No. I didn’t have the time to be uncertain. Things would be alright, and as I sat down in my home I took up a pen in my hand.