The Writer's Den - CreativeWriting.com

The Writer's Den

This is the area where you can read the stories and thoughts that other writers have shared with me. I hope that you also enjoy them.

With Each Drip I Wonder

Sitting here next to my Father-in-law as he suffers in the hospital with various woes from his recent colon cancer and Colonectomy....I wonder. I know the all too familiar sound of the "drip....drip...drip..." from bags emptied and many times replaced of different fluids in which to keep him alive. I wonder if he knows how Blessed he is that he is not a dead man. They removed a sizable part of his colon, and said he had it for at least...4 years. Cancer is a very silent enemy. You just live life right on..not knowing you have it. I also wonder if in his mind after he was diagnosed, what he did with that precious time until the surgery took place. My thoughts reel back to another time, a time when it was me laying there being the recipient of nourishment......

I married in 1985....and soon after moved to Boston. I had waited until I was 27 to get married because I just had to ensure I had the skill and education it took just in case someone left me with a lot of children. We hear so many stories.

I was on faculty at the New England College of Optometry. I got sick, with various central nervous system issues right away. I loved the high pressure job, but apparently moving, getting married, sitting for hours in Boston traffic to get to Beacon street was beginning to wear on me. That is what the Neurologist said anyway. Not a day went by I did not have a headace. My marriage was not going well, and my thoughts were of an easier time, when my brothers played their various antics on me in our home and got full away with it because I loved them too much to tell. But I was safe in the arena of a home from which parents loved....and God lived. Somehow, my new enviornement was not comparitavely....well, anywhere near.

Time went on as the headaches progressively got worse, and I was told it was tension. Stress. Just too much for one girl to take.

Then came the seizures after I had my first child. A girl. Of course they thought Multiple Sclerosis. That idea was banished quickly with a trip to Vanderbilt University. This man was the best I had yet seen, but, he still did not know what it was...the MRI had not been perfected yet, though he did not seem to think that brain tumor was it either. All I seemed to do was go in and out of hospitals...with mean nurses, nice nurses, hurried doctors galloping by, the smell of ....well, illness. That smell. I counted the drips, and thanked God for each one. The drips from the various bags. They tried, but...well, what came to be 8 years later and 2 children now...and suffering to much to know for someone so young. Someone who had never been sick. Those drips represented life. I was not going to allow anything to defeat my life.

One day in September of 1993, I was bathing and singing with a headache that had now become a part of my daily routine. I just thought to myself, "No, won't wear that headband again, it is growing too tight and giving me worse headaches.".........and the idea came to me that something was really killing me. Something. The pain was becoming too much to bear, and my children needed me. So, I jumped up, threw something on....actually a blue dotted sundress, and ran to my doctor's office. I was there to find the truth..and I was just so angry.

I saw the nurses who ignored me through the glass. Then I began slamming my fists over and over on the glass windows separating them from me. They began yelling "Lydia, you don't have an appointment today. You don't." In return, I yelled..." I do now......!!!!" and continued with now bloody fists until I fainted backwards with a Pepsi in my hand.

Upon awakening, the most handsome man I had ever seen was talking to me in a whisper. I said....."Are you my Guardian Angel?". Laughingly he said, "No Sweetie, but you are in trouble, and we are sending you down for some tests, and it is about time we get to the bottom of all this, I am a doctor in this practice as your doctor is not here." Ding.......all I remembered until I woke up in a hospital bed surrounded by my family and some strange guy looking over me. I KNEW he was not my Guardian Angel. He began to speak in fluent, yet unbelivable words.

He said..."Lydia, you have a sizable brain tumor laying between your brain halves. This particular tumor could only found with contrast. You will require surgery by me, and I am not from here. I am not on your insurance. I am from a different hospital and they thought it best I do this surgery.....then he began talking coma, and death, and I began squawling like a baby...."YOU ARE NOT GOD, THERE IS A GOD, BUT YOU ARE NOT HIM, NO, I WILL NOT DIE.....YOU ARE WRONG....!!!!!!." So, a nurse came immedietly to hush me with a huge needle full of something to make me sleep. I remember looking around at my parents, and my husband, and my brothers...who were just holding it in as I began to drift away in a finally quiet slumber. I told God right there and then with each sound of the ..drip..drip..drip...that I loved Him, and if he would only spare me, I would live for Him forever....and tell everyone I met about the miracle He did in my life.....and saved me , and.....Yawn....all the things I would do for mankind.....and....drip...drip...drip.

It was a long surgery. Nine hours I think. They had to remove the top of my head to get the thing out. Then, staple it back on, and wrap me as a mummy. When I awoke, my doctor was right near me....as if he were signing me off in a very cold hallway. I said ,"Hey, I told you I would make it, does St. Mary's have any Pepsi?"....hehe, I thought that man had seen a ghost. He just about jumped right out of his skin. He began yelling for me to move this arm and that leg....and threw the entire chart in the air and hugged me. I graciously hugged him in return by throwing up blood all over him. Sorry. I felt horrible. He did not seem to care though.

The fact of the matter is I lived. And it hurt. And I looked like a freak with the bandages off. But I was known in St. Mary's as the walking, talking miracle of God. Doctors had come from everywhere to see the light seemingly coming from nowhere illuminating my face. I still see people in the grocery store who are nurses, and they ask me if I am that "Angel girl." He he. I told them.

Now I am not going to say life has been easy. No way. But I will say this, it has been almost 6 years, and no one can tell a thing has happened to me. Boy, does that ever make you think about mortality and what you think and do when push comes to shove, and it is only you and God. And you are doing some fine talking....but He knows the keepers. He knows who means it. He must have in my case.

Now, I spend all my time praying for people who are in the situation I was. I try to give them hope. I tell my children who, by the day, wants the story to get jucier. I feel it is quite juicy enough.

They especially love to hear how they could never find me in my room, because I was fleeing the floor to go to different places of suffering. Places where people had no visitors. I fluffed their pillows. I kissed their cheek. And soon, I would hear over the intercom...."Would LYDIA please return to her room, the doctor is waiting AGAIN!!!."

I think to myself over and over as I visit people suffering as I had, if the drip means anything special to them. My Father-in-law is a real military man, and on my watch I just press that pain button with each grimace I see. He does not like it, but I do it anyway. Now, I am in control. I call it as I see it.

I wonder if anyone really knows the will to survive. I don't think so. Too many give up very soon. They feel that the only thing worse than dying, is continuing to live.

I find that very sad. If not for my will to live, I would not be here. Times have been bad. Kids have had to grow up seeing a mommy who is sick many times over. Too many missed school plays, too much ribbing from other kids on the bus that their mom had no brain, too many Holidays they could not spend with me because I was too sick to go.That kind of radical surgery is not one to just get over. It takes years. But I am here. I am breathing. I love the unloved, speak to the unspeakable and think the unthinkable. I want my Father-in-Law to realize why he lived. I want everyone to realize it is not some fluke. He has a strong will to live. Good. That is a good start. Now, to get to whom to thank for living against all odds. His weren't exactly shining like a new penny either.

I hope, as I hear the all knowing....drip..drip..drip..he will know who really saved his life.

Lydia Elizabeth Benitez

The Illusion of Human Remains

There before a new image of God and his minions
she becomes as a limp sheet of wet ,blood stained paper.
The last trace sparkles of what once was a proud woman
dissolving like starved children before the very gates
of a hellish furnace intent on the destruction of flesh...
A weak attempt at humor.

She looks to the framed photograph of her dead husband.
A proud man who had taken his own life one brilliant
summer day as his wife lay in the heat of another man's
dripping passion. She can still hear the gun fire erupting as she herself ,then,
reached an orgasam of etheral heights.
It is with these thoughts choking her own torn soul
that she climbs to the roof of a weather worn church
in the heart of humanitys favored place of worship...
The slums of blind faith. There ,she opens a dusty bottle of black ale
and proposes a toast to the decadence that has been her life thus far.
There is a forlorn look of acceptence upon her deeply lined face
now fluid with an eagerness for the finality of death.
She reachs beneath the frayed waistband of her sweat soaked pants
and withdraws a loveingly loaded hand gun...freshly cleaned and oiled.
She places the cold barrel gently against her own forehead...
softly closes her eyes forever and...
Slowly...so very slowly...pulls the trigger.

Paul D. Elder - April.16.1999

"New Orleans"

Here's the scenario: People with blank eyes are walking the strees of New Orleans, unbrellas in hand, stove-pipe hats on their heads.

"Welcom to Psychoville...", one says as I walk by in my headlight morning glow.

I contemplate his greeting. I don't know where I am. Cars Slow down as they pass me. They're all dusty grey. There's a big spooky tree at the end of the street. I think it's Boo Radley's but I'm not sure. A shadow moves in the distance. A raven cries aloud. I turn to my left and head towards the school. The yard is empty, sings swaying in the sind. They creak as they move. I bend down to pick up a syringe off the ground. Blood appears on my finger.

"Bastard...", I say quietly to myself.

The Score: Needle-1, Me-0

I never win, but I'm no sore loser. Defeated I walk away. Head down, shoulders slouched. My finger hurts. Some girl with blank eyes and cherry red lipstick is crying in the corner, underneath the slide. The syringe has struck again. I walk by the graffiti covered, brick walls of this ancient school. It's roof falling apart and the windows all cracked and dirty.

"Such a pretty town...", I say under a whisper, as I walk toward the train tracks. They lie over the bridge and past the concrete mill. Blank eyed truck drivers, in their big-assed concret trucks pass me by.

I'm so lonely.

The air smells of smoke and urine, with the faint tint of lavender to it. I'm almost at the tracks. The grass surrounding me is tall and sickly yellow. Quite different from the kind I used to know and faintly remember. I lie down at the tracks, thinking of the good times. When the wind had a rich flavour and the grass was green.

The train is coming, the sound of it deafening. The sky is deep blue.

Post Cards

This short story is autobiographical in nature and takes one through the ups and downs of life. With considerable honesty, Victor J. Paul, tells it like it is. Living through the 60's, recovering through the 70's, finding life again in the 80's, succumbing to technology in the 90's he describes the philosophical travels that mark a generation of people searching for the answers to life's little questions.

Part One
Part Two

Give me back what is mine.

Ripping tissues of time
A pain so deep, so hard, too hard
A pain wounded by the truth.

Why, he is dead by the particles of the earth
Living by the particles of my soul
A mistake so well chosen.

This agonising scream,hear it?
Deep from within.
Cannot withdraw the conclusion of this faith.
Cannot reach,in serenity,
Far beyond sanity
Cruel unwanting hands visibly stealing what was mine.

Emptyness harsh yet forgiving.
Tears made fully from dull ambition
Ambition refused fate for him.
Eyes,his,permanent closing for curious witnesses
Pierce my words of healing
Unconsciously deepening my strength.

Marie-Noelle Chicoine - November 1997.

Curiosity

It is said that curiosity kills the cat. I have to ask, "Am I a cat?" If so I fear that I am on a downward spiral, slowly moving towards a death caused by this love I have found. Never in my life has a mystery like her taken over my thoughts, and yet now she has become my every wonder. I have become an explorer, and she a strange new world daring me to join her. I fear that I am curious enough to travel endless miles to glance into her eyes while trying to figure out her dreams, perhaps to see what it is that makes this timex called love tick. Curious enough to touch her golden hair and soft skin, perhaps only to see if she is real. Curious to lie down next to her and drift off to sleep, perhaps only to see if she would be there when I awoke. Yes I truly hope I am not a cat, because above all I would love to live, perhaps only to be curious and do it all over again.....

Bleau Deckerd
1999

Waking

Dreams envisioned comatose...
such splendid, wandering sights.
Nocturnal splash of wonderment...
the dream, in birth, takes flight.

Such sweet, growing bliss,
to which I kiss the fantasy...
alive with passion.
Nothing here shall be amiss.

In this, I am a traveler...
not yet quite awake.
Rapture caress, almost sedate...
I am near a crystal, singing lake.

No ending passions...
to fill one night.
The dream alive...
in glorious flight.

Eternal wave of merriment...
I will not leave this place.
The dream, before me,calling...
lovingly offers fantastic grace.

Paul D. Elder...December.27.1998.

The Land Of Regrets

It was a nice lazy saturday & I was sitting down to write this essay when my mind started wandering. My mind usually wanders 'in the wild' as I call it, (because I don't know how it, or rather, I got there) but sometimes I go to explored and recorded places like the 'Main Room' (where handy information is stored in files so that I could pull them out of shelves to read) or the libraries of my English, math & language knowledge (where I go for more detailed information) or the 'Conference Hall' (where I go if I have a decision to make).

This time, the wandering seemed real, and as I made my way down the passage leading to the English library, I could almost feel the dark. A cold wind was blowing. I ought to add a light here I thought.

I was at the door when I felt something light and small bump into my back. I turned around and saw a cream coloured envelope that the wind had blown from somewhere. I picked it up. Nothing was written on it. I turned it around. there was no return address on it but it was addressed to:

The Land Of Regrets
Mind
PIN: CONFESS

As soon as I read that, the wind grew colder and faster and I felt myself lifted off my feet and whizzed off somewhere. In a moment,I was in a dark place with coals burning like red eyes here and there. as I walked on, I was suddenly surrounded by people who were being tortured by some invisible being wielding a sword, club or whip. Some people were even burning. The people suddenly turned to face me. The torturing stopped. They edged towards me menacingly. Suddenly out of nowhere, a sword jabbed me, but the pain went away almost as soon as it was afflicted. It was the same case with all the other clubs, coals, whips & spears that were now being thrown at me.

"Stop!" I screamed, but to no avail. Why are they doing this to me & who are they? I thought.

A voice in my mind answered. " These are people against whom you have made hasty wishes when you were angry. In this land, those wishes come true. The torturing goes on for as long as you live, unless..."

"Unless WHAT!?" I yelled. "Unless you confess at least one bad thing you did for every bad thing you did in your life for as long as you remember."

I did just that. One by one, the people and weapons disappeared and everything became dark again. A few coals remained,burning. Thankfully, I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was back in the passage to the library. The wind was blowing again.

The voice spoke. "You are lucky this time, there are many other 'envelope' lands and they are all bad. You can't escape some lands for a certain period of time, and sometimes, ever. The hint to escaping the land is in the 'pin' code." The voice then disappeared.

Shivering and hugging myself with cold, I made my way back down the passage to the main room feeling with all my heart that I'd had enough of my mind for a while. Suddenly, the wind blew something into my face. It was a cream coloured envelope, just like the first. I turned it around. There was no written address or stamp but it was addressed to:

Monster Land
Mind
PIN: DOOM

Uh oh, me and my big fat curiosity.......

Written by:
Archana Yerra
Age: 12
India

DESIRE

Sheer shades of lost desire,
awash with a spark of human fire...
With you I hold the key
to this sweet treasure...honesty.
Angels breath to speak her name,
enraptured now am I...with her...
a southern flame.

So swiftly now,upon armoured steed...
shall I seek thee upon clear tolling...

the midnight hour.

Paul D.Elder 1998