1.     Somewhere between dreams and fantasies

”What do you think is the difference between a dream and a fantasy?”

The steady hum of the air conditioning unit felt more overbearing than usual today, even though there was nothing outright unusual about the situation otherwise. The walls were the same, the window was the same, and this man sitting in front of me was also the same as always.

In my experience, there are three types of people when it comes to dealing with dying patients. The most common response is always pity. They feel bad for you, or maybe for themselves for having to deal with you.

The second type ignores it or acts like they’re ignorant of it. Perhaps the sight or thought of death frightens them, so they don’t want to think about it. Simple as that.

This man who sat before me was a good example of the third because he considered me a form of entertainment. He had a morbid curiosity towards death and spouted this pseudo-philosophical nonsense because he was excited to hear what a dying person had to say about his questions.

It’s like I was a zoo animal he somehow couldn’t grow tired of.

“A dream is something a person can hope to achieve with effort. Fantasies skip the effort part and focus only on the reward.”

My answer clearly bothered him. He was surely hoping for something profound or grim to write about on social media. The side of his mouth always twitched when he was told something, he didn’t want to hear.

To this day, I still hate him and everything he represents as a human being.

A middle-aged man with nothing better to do with his life, outside of indulging in shameless behavior like this while at work. Day after day, I wished for him to simply shut up and do his job.

I had seen him for the vast majority of my life. Countless years of his stupid questions, and today was no exception.

“Your surgery will start in an hour.” His statement was cold.

My answer was not what he hoped for… but having known him for years, it’s not like I didn’t expect this. I’m sure in his egocentric world, I lost my value as a human as soon as I was no longer giving him fuel for his ‘The wisdom of the dying’-blog.

Just for the record, it had close to no traffic whatsoever. I checked.

Having spent my entire life poked… prodded… and split open by doctors, generally made it really difficult to feel any sort of attachment to them.

The inner walls of the hallways had recently been painted to be more colorful, and yet somehow, no matter how I stared at them, all I could see was the usual gray and white.  It was almost as if hospitals had the power to drain all color from things.

I knew I was dying. I had been dying ever since I was born. Some kind of issues with my heart, to avoid going too far into medical jargon.

… And, to call the heart mine was a bit of an overstatement. My original heart was probably bubbling in some weird jar somewhere in the hospital storage.

Another transplant was waiting today. In a little bit, I was to be opened up again, but I really wondered why.

What was the point of extending my life by a couple of years?

Even if I lived, I’d be locked away in my hospital room. It’s not a particularly joyful way of life. After being stuck here for so long, I really started wondering if this kind of empty morality was really worth anything. The only reason they kept me alive was to experiment on my body… but they kept claiming it was because ‘life is valuable’. I didn’t really see any value in mine, so why would they keep me alive just for the sake of it?

I couldn’t figure it out. Furthermore, I felt like my existence didn’t genuinely equate to much outside of bringing pain to everyone. Even my parents stopped visiting me a good while ago. I couldn’t honestly blame them, since they were in a completely hopeless situation because of me.

The cost of keeping me alive forced them to work like horses from day to night with no breaks. There was no money left for them whatsoever, so they could barely eat. They couldn’t just stop funneling money for my sake either, or society would judge them brutally and mercilessly without a care for being ‘neglectful and evil’.

They were trapped in a web of endless misery weaved purely out of my existence. Their relationship was on the rocks because of the stress, and I’m sure they despised me with all of their hearts for getting them tangled up like this.

So, I couldn’t help but wonder… what really was the point of continuously investing endless funds into my survival?

I was never able to make any kinds of friends outside the internet. Surely, nobody would miss me if I just disappeared one day.

I have seen it multiple times. Someone just stops posting on a website or chatting server, and instead of really looking into it, people just move on. I couldn’t imagine it being any different with me either. Nobody there knew who I was, what I looked like, or anything about me outside the games we played together.

… Not that there was much to know in the first place.

All I ever did was play video games on my laptop, read, and answer stupid questions. That pretty much summed up my life.

If I answered the doctor’s question completely honestly. The answer would maybe have been something more like “There is no difference. Some people can’t gun for their dreams even if they wanted to put in the effort because life is not equal, so their dreams remain no different from fantasies.”

I’m certain that would have become his social media quote of the week.

As I got taken to the operating room, it was difficult to think about much. Upon birth, I was confirmed to have a serious heart defect. I was able to have a somewhat normal life until I was around ten, but ever since then I’ve been stuck here in this hospital. My heart was so weak, I couldn’t exert myself in any sense. Moving around too much was bad for me, so I was just about skin and bones. Getting impassioned about things to the point of having my heart race was also out of the question. Saying I was a bit detached emotionally due to this was probably a pretty gross understatement.

When I was eleven, I had my first heart transplant.

Despite the successful surgery, I remained fragile. I couldn’t go to school in person anymore, so I attended online classes, but I never really understood why. People seemed to have this… strange sense of normalcy they had to keep up. I had the right to a ‘normal life’ despite my circumstances, is what they called it, and yet somehow, to me, it always felt more like I had the responsibility to be as normal as possible regardless of my clearly abnormal existence.

What the hell was the point of me cramming pointless knowledge into my head, when I was going to die soon anyway? Was it to distract me from the inevitable end? Was it to make it so I don’t seem so different from everyone else, so people wouldn’t get frightened or reminded too much of mortality through me? What was the point of simulating a ‘normal life’ when there was no way I was going to have one anyway?

I for sure didn’t see a point. All I wanted to do was play video games on my laptop and read. Getting to go on fantastical adventures to forget the misery of reality for a moment felt much more sensible than studying what atoms do when they interact.

Science was supposed to be helping me, and yet I was still dying.  

If anything, I think magic was much more likely to help me at this point than science.

With magic, the happy ending was always in sight, even in the most miserable circumstances. If only I had magic, I could gain control of my life again. Like a final straw, it was the one thing I couldn’t stop grasping onto.

As a teenager, I enjoyed drawing magical sigils on my arms. They were from my favorite game. It had witches as the enemy, but despite their evil nature, they also had incredible healing powers. The witches had no illness or faulty hearts. In fact, they didn’t have hearts in the first place.

I loved them then… And I still love them to this day.

I adored everything about them; the powers, the aesthetic, the elegance and fear they commanded. I often wore a big witch hat my parents got me for my fourteenth birthday when I played my games.

Something about… controlling fear instead of living endlessly in it… It really connected with me.

I truly idolized witches.

They were everything I ever wanted.

But.

No matter how precisely I drew the symbols on my arms.  No matter how well I learned all the chants and prayers the game had.

Regardless of what I did, I never gained control. Because magic doesn’t exist.

Life isn’t a storybook, so there is no drama arc. I highly doubt there is a divine plan or a God either. If there is… I’m sure that God REALLY hates me. I don’t quite know why whatever was up there hated me so much, since I never really did much outside of sitting in my bed. It was quite difficult to be religiously virtuous in my situation, but it was just as hard to be sinful.

Because of this, I never figured out what God would have wanted from me anyway. Either way… if a higher power does exist, I’m sure I messed my life up one way or another to be dealt a hand like this.

Maybe I was a real asshole in a past life? Hah… I wouldn’t put it past me…

The air smelled sterile. People whose identities were shrouded by their masks walked around idly. This was everyday work for them. I wonder if you can ever grow bored with heart surgery.

The operating room was full of machinery I had seen before. I had been here multiple times. The humming of the air conditioner began slowly growing louder.

I wonder if there even was an air conditioner in the surgery suite. Somehow, I couldn’t really remember at the moment. The humming was growing so loud, that it got hard to focus on anything other than it.

The ceiling gradually grew distorted.

As I cursed my existence and wished to never have been born in this world… As I cursed God or whatever was out there for my fate… I began hallucinating.

All the sounds were suddenly gone, all the color of the room was gone, all the people around me were gone.

It was all white.

Completely pure white with black outlines, like an unfinished drawing.

I was laying on my back on the operating table, staring at the ceiling, unable to move, when a face began pushing through the solid white I was forced to look at.

Like a liquid, a human-like shape began bubbling through and approaching me slowly.

It was a woman with completely white skin. Calling it white might have been an understatement. It was ghastly to the point it felt almost as if it were radiating a cold, dispassionate light.

I couldn’t quite grasp any features of her face, even when she came closer… outside a smile.

A completely emotionless smile, like that of a puppet trying to mimic human emotion. Something about it felt incredibly inhuman.

An undeniable sense of fear began growing within me. It felt primordial and instinctive, like something my body was hard-coded to be terrified of.

The pale woman gradually crept further from ceiling, reaching her hands out for me.

I couldn’t move. All I could do was gawk back, as her glowing skin made contact with mine.