In A Week I Will Be Dead

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Sanctioned

!!!TW!!!

Suicide and SH references, unkind thoughts

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Noah

I remember the first time I rode a bus. I was very little, and I can remember that I could only just see out of the window. Mum was there, and Gracie was in her arms. She was beautiful, quiet, bright blue eyes observing the world in blacks and whites. She never cried, she was – is – the perfect child. I can't wait to see her.

I looked out of the window and saw the country fields whirl by. Pasture lolloping onto open plains, merging into little woodland areas where all the witches and pixies lived. I wanted to live in the woods when I was younger, and build a tree house and never come down. Maybe today I would be better off if I'd done that.

My first thought was that there weren't any seatbelts. My second thought was that a robber had stolen them. My third thought was that all the witches and pixies were aboard. There was a really old person with long silver hair, and she was talking but not out loud. There was also a man who only had one long eyebrow and was filling out a grid with black and white squares on it. I decided it must be some sort of dark magic. This made me really scared.

I started to shake violently and thrash about, and mum couldn't do anything because Gracie was on her lap. She tried talking to me, but I couldn't listen because I knew the man was putting an evil curse on me. It was really scary. I think that was probably the first time I encountered panic in its purest form, and it wasn't very nice. I felt sicky and hot and light headed and tingly and all the things a ten-year-old shouldn't feel.

I didn't stop wriggling and crying until the man with one eyebrow left the bus, but even then, I knew it was too late: I had a curse on me.

I would later discover that pixies didn't exist, monobrows are not a source of magic and crosswords don't curse people. It was just simply a figment of a childish imagination, untamed, trying to make sense of a brain that was wired incorrectly.

I stopped seeing the countdown on a zebra crossing as the time to complete mission impossible, but rather the number of seconds it could take me to neck a bottle of pills. I stopped seeing the lights on cars as angels on the left and devils on the right when stuck in traffic at night, but rather metallic angelic demons that could crush me and let me go. I stopped seeing bridges as the places that trolls hid under, but platforms from which you could simply just refuse to be.

The bus arrives and I get on. All the magic gone, just a mundane mode of public transport. No longer taking me through mystic kingdoms of unknown land, but rather through acres of arable farmland, every inch of it owned with a signature. What was I even scared of? I mean realistically they should have been scared of me: a little boy that had a panic attack over a man completing the local crossword. And even now: a teenager wearing hospital clothes, carrying a black bin liner, buried under a trench coat.

Seeing the world without music is like watching a movie without sound. Strange. Barren. Bare. Each of us always imagine our lives as a movie, complete with ups and downs and forgiveness and hope. But that's not true. I mean, look at me? I've had years of therapy, take meds every day, went to a mental ward, and just saved a boy from dying, yet I am still not happy. I've just been what my parents went through. The torture of not knowing whether you saved a life or not. The pacing. The crying. The shock. Yet still, deep deep down I know that I'm still the same Noah that was hauled into the emergency room from the back of an ambulance. Only now, the difference is that this Noah wants to get better.

There's also something strange about the size of a bus. You can see out the windows at the road on either side, and observe that you are in a literal moving room. Three metres by fourteen metres, an area on wheels covering the tarmac. It's so open spaced that you feel like you're in some sort of Tardis, travelling with a group of people you have never met, and will never meet again.