Waking Up One Last Time

When he woke up the next time, he was aware and alert and even painfully conscious of every bone in his body. He swore to himself that this was the last time he will drink a drop of the fluid that had swallowed up more than a decade of his life.

When he had first woken up after twenty days of drinking whiskey non-stop, he remembered finding his t-shirt and shorts and the bedsheet around him caked in a rancid layer of dried mucus-like substance. His hands felt limp and his legs, lifeless. He couldn’t find an ounce of energy in any of his fingers or toes or knees or elbows or any other joint in his body. He thought to himself with a smirk, this is probably how it looks like for dying old men with nobody to clean their stools after them. This is probably how the last few hours of hundreds of humans must have been. Before me. And will be. After me. So it’s okay to embrace death without feeling too bad about it.

Since he couldn’t leave the bed, he figured that he needed to get rid of this noxious odour around him at least. Maybe the fastest & the most pleasant way to die would to be pass out with more alcohol in the bloodstream. He propped himself up on one elbow, and stretched his other hand as much as possible towards the bedside table. A plastic translucent tumbler and a glass bottle with some clear golden liquid stood on that table, a few inches apart, as if they had vowed to avoid any interaction between each other or even the human hand coming at them.

He reached for the tumbler, but it refused to take shelter in his grasp. As the tumbler tumbled down the table, it spilled out whatever was left of the cloudy brown fluid staining its walls for so long. The smell was strong but also sweeter than the bilious concoction he was lying in. He decided to reach for the bottle and before he could open the cap, it fell down. The whiff of odour made him even more squeamish. He took a deep breath, and then another and then another. No, he mumbled. He needed to comfort his senses before death ends the need for any.

He lowered his forearms and bent them to explore beneath the bed. His fingers began to feel around the floor till they touched a cylindrical container. He immediately knew that he had to be careful with this one, lest it rolls farther away from him. Maybe it was the knowledge that this vessel contained water, or maybe it was the olfactory discomfort, or maybe it was what he had experienced so many times after a phase of binge drinking for days: dehydration. He felt his mouth and throat drying up very fast and for a second he thought, if I vomit blood now I wouldn’t know if it’s the liver or the throat. He mustered all the power he could to keep himself from coughing, but amidst the swirl of sarcastic sentences he kept thinking of in third person, he was finding it hard to keep his eyes open or even concentrate on the activity he intended to do.

He thought of giving one attempt at recovering the water from the other edge of the bed. His hand landed exactly on the bottle; and his grip was firm around the cylindrical body of the vessel. With the familiar confidence that comes only under the influence of his favourite intoxicant, he yanked his hand out from beneath bed. Instead of rolling back up on the bed with this trophy of a water bottle, he rolled outwards and toppled downwards. Banging his shoulder against the edge of the bed on this brief journey to the bottom, he lost control of the inertia of motion that he had so forcefully imposed on the bottle of water.

As he lay on the cold marble floor, the sacral bone sent a tingle up his spine. He turned to look at the bottle of water which had stopped turning after hitting the wall more than a few feet away. Then, he turned the other way round and peeped underneath the bed. There was no light, no odour and no sight of death either. As the pain from the waist started rising upwards, and something sticky started dripping off the left eye-brow, he dragged himself into the dark cave beneath the bed. His back hurt too much lie on, so he curled up on the side, and rested his head on his right forearm. He closed his eyes.

When he woke up the next time, he was aware, alert and painfully conscious of every bone in his body.