Cleave

Recovery sucks. Honestly. It fucking sucks. It’s painful, it’s boring, and it goes on forever. I mean, obviously it's better than the alternative of being dead, but sometimes I felt like it wasn't much better than death. I didn’t want to complain about it too much though, because I was told that I came pretty close to leaving this world and if I made too many half-serious jokes about death being preferable to being poked and prodded all day, it would make people pretty uncomfortable.

It took me a few days after I woke up to be fully aware of what was going on around me, though I think I could attribute a lot of that to the various medications the doctors had me on. When I woke up, I was pretty confused and also a bit scared. I couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t, and that was pretty scary.

When I was "asleep", in my mind, I was in a waiting room – a generic, sterile, white waiting room. And I was waiting for something. I tried and tried to figure out what I was waiting for, but I had no idea. I was just there, waiting for it. There was nobody else around, except I could hear announcements on the intercom, but they were in a language I didn’t understand and they didn’t sound like typical things you would hear over an intercom in a waiting room either. It was a flow of speech, like the speaker was talking to someone else and just forgot to switch off the microphone.

Occasionally while I waited for whatever it was I was waiting for, I could feel things, like, I could feel my hand being squeezed but there was nobody there squeezing it. I remember feeling like that should have been worrying but it actually brought me comfort and I found myself wishing for the sensation to happen more often. Sometimes I tried squeezing back but I could only get my fingers to make the slightest of movements and there was no way that whoever the mysterious entity was would be able to feel my attempts.

When I was there in the waiting room, I couldn’t tell the time. There was a clock on one of the walls; I could hear it ticking; but I couldn’t read what it said. Every time I tried to tell the time, the face of the clock blurred, or the numbers would shift around, or there would be no hands. It was like I was deliberately being kept in the metaphorical dark about how long I was there in the waiting room. I found out after I woke up that it had been nearly two weeks. In my mind though, it wasn’t as simple as that. A day could have gone on for one hundred years and I couldn’t have known. I could have woken up 80 years old. That was one of the first things I checked when I became more aware after I woke up. I had to see whether I had aged, so I asked someone to take a photo of me and was relieved to see that I still looked the same age as I did before I went to sleep.

I don’t remember how I went into the coma. I mean, I’ve been told, obviously, but I don’t actually remember it. The last thing I distinctly remember before the waiting room was finding out that I had been successful in getting the apartment I liked – which unfortunately, since I didn’t get to sign any paperwork before the crash, is now somebody else's home because the owner wasn’t able to hold it while I was in hospital – and apparently that was a few days before the car crash. I don’t remember having dinner with Rochelle and Braden; I don’t remember the car following Angel and me as we headed to prom – none of it. Sometimes if I really concentrate hard, I can see a memory of a flash of headlights, or Angel smiling at me, but for the most part, it’s all just blank. And besides, those memories could have come from anywhere, not just from that night.

Not only was it frustrating not being able to remember what happened, it was also confusing. The first few days after I woke up, everything felt different. The first thing I saw when I finally opened my eyes and I was able to get them to focus was my mother, who was holding my hand and staring at me intensely. And in my mind, she had never sent me away, never disowned me, and never hated me for loving a boy. She was just my mother again – my normal mother who loved me. So when Angel came in a little while later while she was still there and leaned over the bed to kiss me, I freaked out, because I thought she didn’t know about our relationship. Then Angel freaked out because he thought I didn’t remember who he was and that I was scared of a stranger trying to kiss me. That took a little while to sort out but eventually we managed to get our stories in the right order – Angel and I were in a relationship, I remembered who he was, and my mother still hated the fact that I was with him but was dealing with it for the time being while I was in the hospital.

Similar things to that happened a few times during the next few days, but they weren’t as intense. They were little things, like me remembering that Angel’s tattoo of a clock was on his left hand when it had always been on the right, or thinking that I was still 17 instead of 18 even though I remembered having my birthday. As I said, confusing, but most people were very patient with me and helped me get things clear.

I had the police come to visit me a couple of times after I was moved from the ICU to High Dependency, five days after I woke up, but they never stayed for long because I couldn't really tell them much more about the crash than they already knew. I did mention the texts that Angel was getting before it all happened but I didn't know if they would have been relevant to the case or not. I wanted to know more about the investigation but they wouldn't tell me anything I hadn't already been told by Angel. “You have a long recovery process ahead of you. Focus on that,” they told me. It was annoying, being kept in the dark but they were right. I did have a long recovery process ahead of me.

The doctors told me that I had a small compound fracture in my skull, a broken pelvis and a couple of broken ribs. The compound skull fracture resulted in me having to go into surgery when I first was taken to the hospital to help prevent any brain damage. I was told that a compound fracture means an open fracture with the skin and tissue broken and that my brain was partially exposed, which meant that I was on pretty strong antibiotics to prevent any infection, as well as strong painkillers to hold my constant headache at bay for about ten days.

My motor skills suffered for a few weeks as well. I wasn't able to do simple things like hold a spoon to feed myself or use my phone to text my friends and it was frustrating and scary. I felt like an invalid and I really hated feeling so weak, but thankfully, with physiotherapy, I was able to learn to use my hands again to their full extent.

It took longer to be able to walk again unaided; about eight weeks in total. I didn't need surgery for my broken pelvis, but I did need extensive physiotherapy. It was painful and difficult and there were many times I was ready to give up and resign myself to being in a wheelchair for the rest of my life, but my boyfriend and my family really helped me to push past the negative thoughts and keep going with the therapy. I won't go into too much detail, but the lower half of my body was a pretty horrific sight for a long time, with severe bruising covering most of my crotch and hip area. Seeing my body like that made me feel disgusting for a long time, even when the bruising had mostly disappeared and I was very insecure when I had to shower and use the bathroom with assistance.

In all, recovery was a very long, very painful and embarrassing process and you have no idea how thrilled I was when I walked out of the hospital with Angel’s arm around firmly my waist (I was still slightly unsteady on my feet – it would still be a little while before I was fully recovered, but the doctors were satisfied with my progress enough to let me go home) about three months after the crash. My mother and father followed us out, my dad carrying a bag full of my clothing and various other items I'd been bought to curb my boredom when I was resting between therapy sessions and visiting hours were over. Mom, Dad, Angel and I headed to my parents’ car so that we could switch some suitcases from their car to Angel’s beat up truck, because the day I left the hospital was the day that I was moving in with my boyfriend and his best friend.

I didn’t want to go back to my parents’ house when I left the hospital, despite the fact that my mother was willing to put aside her hatred of my relationship for a while until I was able to find a new place to live. While I was in hospital, I had noticed how much my parents had missed each other while they had been separated and it hurt to know that it was my fault, so I didn’t want to keep them apart any longer. Since I wasn’t able to accept the apartment I liked before the crash, the next best option was to move in with Angel and Drew. Drew was more than happy to accommodate me and his house was actually perfect for my needs because it was all on one storey and I’d been told by my physiotherapist to avoid stairs as much as possible for a while.

It took a little while to get used to the idea of living away from home, but I found that I enjoyed it. I was finally able to cuddle and kiss my boyfriend without having to worry about my parents walking in and making things awkward. Sex was off the table for a while – yet another rule the physiotherapist gave me – but we were able to manage our physical urges for each other by using our hands and mouths to get each other off and that was enough to last until I was given the all clear to start doing those more physical extracurricular activities once more.

Life slowly started to get back to normal. Four months on from getting out of the hospital, I had my physio sessions for my pelvis cut down to once a fortnight and doctors’ check-ups to make sure my brain was still working fine cut down to once a month. I was starting to ease into going to work at the supermarket once a week (they kindly kept the job open for me since it was only a casual job to begin with) and I had dinner at my parents’ house every Sunday night. My mother refused to have Angel over on “family night” as she called it, but she slowly started to treat me like I was her son again, which I guess was a good thing. I knew she didn’t understand how I could love another guy, but at least she was trying to be back on good terms with me again. We still argued occasionally and she would slip in little snide remarks about Angel and how she wished I would find a nice girl instead and to “stop all this homosexual nonsense”, but I just told her that it was none of her business and she generally got the hint to shut the fuck up and leave me alone.

It was a long time before we knew exactly what was going to happen with Max and our case against him. Angel and I originally wanted to have Max tried for attempted murder, but our lawyer said we were more likely to get a conviction for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon – the deadly weapon here being his car – and that’s what we ended up going with. Max tried to plead insanity. According to his lawyer, and much to Angel’s surprise, Max had diagnosed bipolar disorder and was taking medication for it, but when Angel broke up with him, he went into an extreme manic episode that boiled into rage, and that was what caused him to slam his car into ours on prom night.

Despite this, Max was convicted of aggravated assault, and sentenced to 3 years in jail, with a chance of probation after 6 to 12 months. It wasn’t the ‘jailed for life’ result Angel and I were hoping for, but it was still a decent result according to our lawyer, so we were happy. In any case, we hoped he wouldn’t bother us again after he was released.

The night the final verdict was announced, everything changed; and for once, in the best way possible.

Angel and I were sitting on the couch in the living room. We had just finished watching a movie and were cuddling in the quiet darkness. My head was resting lightly on his shoulder and one of his arms was wrapped around my waist. His hands were playing with mine; his fingers weaving in and out of my own. It seemed so absentminded and I was so comfortable that I barely even noticed when one of his hands moved away for few seconds before it returned to mine once more and pressed something into it. It was small, smaller than the palm of my hand and almost cube shaped, but not quite. It had a rounded top and was covered in velvet. I couldn’t see it in the dark, so I pulled slightly away from Angel to turn on the lamp beside the couch we were sitting on. It was a jewellery box, I realised, red velvet with a hinged lid. I glanced at Angel and he nodded at it to tell me to open it, so I did, slowly.

Inside, nestled in between a slit in the small pillow, sat a simple silver ring with a small diamond in the centre.

“Oh, my God,” I whispered. I thought I knew what this was, but I had to make sure. I looked at Angel once more. He was smiling softly, nervously at me, before he slowly got off the couch and sat in front of me on bended knee.

“Marry me,” he said quietly. “Will you marry me, Micah?”

I didn’t even hesitate. He was everything I wanted, and more. I took the ring out of its box and slid it on my finger.

“Yes.”