Crazy awakening E-Book

Ruth Affolter

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 100

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

An old woman is torn from her sleep and suddenly finds herself in another dimension. Surrounded by strange gray figures, she is confronted with her life, the ups and downs of her self and the associated aging process from a new perspective. She unintentionally embarks on a journey through the past and her emotional world, while at the same time trying to free herself from her strange state of limbo and understand who her tormentors are. But it's not that easy to come to terms with your own mortality and your own mistakes ...

Leseprobe

Part 1

It is the cold that makes me shiver and wake up from a restless sleep.

I can't even say for sure whether I was just dozing or sleeping soundly. I remember that I could hear the big pendulum clock in the living room chiming every hour. So my sleep was probably not very deep that night and I will probably doze off again and again today because, as so often lately, I will feel tired and exhausted.

But now I'm cold. Icy winds are blowing around me, even through me? I quickly want to reach for my comforter. But I can't get my hands or arms to move? It seems as if they have disintegrated?

What happened? Normally I know the difference between dreaming and being awake! But I think I know that the current state is neither?

Strangely enough, I can't make out anything concrete either, because I'm completely surrounded by a diffuse light? Like dense fog and I can't see through it!

From time to time, shadows float back and forth. As soon as they dangle opposite me, they stop briefly and, without me being able to see anything clearer, they move on again carelessly. Only their musty stench lingers on me for a while until, thankfully, that too dissipates.

I assume that the shadows didn't notice me.

I hadn't even noticed it earlier, but I move back and forth slightly like a pendulum. All by itself and without my doing? Or is it the icy wind that's making me swing? No, it can't be, the wind is blowing from a different direction!

My insides begin to rumble and suddenly strong and heavy sensations surge out of my stomach area. These forces envelop me like shackles in an instant. Because of them, I can't move anywhere and there is no escape!

Despite the tight shackles, I feel reborn, fresh and free! All the heaviness has been turned outwards and no longer lies within me! My leaden, constantly recurring thoughts have dissolved? It is as if my whole perception has moved into another dimension. All of a sudden, thinking no longer causes me any difficulties. Everything seems clear and simple to me.

Some everyday occurrences that were unsolvable for me and that I had pushed aside in frustration in order to forget them, explain themselves in this moment! What kind of miracle?

They are all patterns that had accumulated and piled up in layers throughout my life, from very complex to very simple. Recurring and for which my hazy mind had found neither an alternative nor a solution!

I haven't felt this light and comfortable for a long time! Only the cold disturbs my perfect state! "Lies", everything inside me immediately cries out! My thoughts tell me in no uncertain terms that it is not the icy wind that is making my body freeze. This cold comes from deep inside me! "But it can't be that!" I immediately try to wriggle out of it. My own thoughts are accusing me of lying? I am supposed to be the one who has shaped my innermost being through all the lies so that I am now freezing! Because my innermost being is me and is inseparable from all my senses and my body. It is not possible to simply disconnect this or that area from myself and set it aside as something separate, not belonging to me, and then simply claim that this area is to blame for the fact that I am now freezing!

It's amazing, this insight. Such clarity immediately scares me! This fear in turn creates an even greater tension in my restraints around me. The whole thing takes a lot of getting used to for my mind. Am I alone to blame for the fact that I'm freezing? Not anyone else or even the weather!

With reluctance, I simply have no choice but to admit my guilt. The emotional shackles around me relax a little for a moment. However, I still can't free myself from them.

No idea how I could help this cold? Not with clothes, anyway.

Since I'm just swinging back and forth like a pendulum and I can't move anywhere, nothing happens. And because I don't know what this is all about, it starts to annoy me, with short, bright flashes coming off me. But as soon as I calm down again, everything seems "normal"again?

It had been a long time since I had dreamed such abstruse things, probably last in my childhood.

But why do I think this state is just a dream? I also notice that not a single pain is bothering me? It feels as if the entire physical burden has fallen away from me!

The ever-present rheumatic pain in my limbs no longer exists? When I was forty years old, I first noticed pain in my armpits and finger joints. The painful swelling in my fingers meant that I could hardly hold anything in my hands and had to put household chores on hold. Gradually, both knees, my neck and my back joined in.

In the beginning, it was enough for me to apply heat pads and regularly rub rheumatism ointment into my aching joints.

The pain has worsened rapidly over the last few years. My strategy of applying heat and ointments only helped to a limited extent. Today I can count on one hand which joints are not yet affected by this disease, where bone is not yet rubbing against bone. It is also no longer possible for me to stretch my fingers, which have become so bent over the years that I can only grip cups and other objects with the balls of my hands  

In all my years with this disease, hardly a day has gone by without me experiencing pain. With the onset of the cold season and especially when snow is on the horizon, the pain becomes severe. Only then do I take the pills prescribed by my doctor. Otherwise, I prefer to keep my hands off them. Although they relieve the pain in my joints and inhibit inflammation, they are so nauseating in my stomach that I can't sleep at night because of nausea and dizziness. As a result of the strong side effects, my daily routine is also severely restricted. I can no longer even tolerate my beloved coffee. My gastric juices can only tolerate chamomile tea and rusks.

Provided I sit or lie motionless for a long time, my joints feel rusty. According to my GP, I should then move my limbs slowly to make them more supple again. However, I often forget to move them or am too lazy to do so! This makes getting up more difficult and painful.

But now, what's going on and why can't I feel my body anymore? In this dull light, I can't even look down at myself anymore?

Without much effort, quickly and clearly, I manage to remember yesterday evening. Normally, the next day I couldn't remember what had happened yesterday or what I had eaten for lunch yesterday? What the weather was like or what time of year it was? I had forgotten everything. To reassure myself, I told myself that knowing all this wasn't important.

In any case, I know that I really wanted to watch the weekly thriller after the daily News. The beginning was quite good and promised to be exciting. After the murder, right at the beginning of the show, I was still able to follow the action really well. Soon, however, many different people were suddenly implicated in the crime and the various connections confused me more and more. I couldn't even use my imagination to categorize the many different eventualities. I kept asking myself who was police and who was civilian? The flood of information completely overwhelmed my mind. What's more, people were speaking so quickly and in High German that I simply couldn't follow! Everything became a jumble of faces and words?

In order to find out who had murdered the young, pretty woman so brutally, I would have had to wait until the end of the show, and I might have fallen asleep and only woken up for the next show or even the one after that. That would have annoyed me even more. So I switched the TV off straight away. Annoyed, of course!

Disappointed beyond measure, I remained sitting in my armchair and regretted my dwindling senses and my loneliness! All the bitterness from last night rises up inside me like hard ribbons that wrap around me and constrict me further.

I can see myself sitting in my armchair, fighting back tears before I started to cry properly. And I didn't want to, because after my past experiences, it would take me days to find my way out of my regrets. I would finally be able to pull myself together again to live a normal life and find the strength to do other things.

So last night I forced myself to banish these dark thoughts immediately and thought about spending the night right here in my armchair instead. It wouldn't have been the first time. Just the thought of laboriously wriggling out of the deep armchair to stand on my thick, water-filled legs immediately sapped the last of my strength!

As I got older, my sensory powers diminished, as did my muscle strength. Where there used to be well-developed muscles on my upper arms, today there is only skin, a little flesh and then the bone. I've often felt this at the doctor's when the receptionist injects the monthly vitamins into my upper arm. I could feel when she had hit the bone because there was almost no muscle left.

At home, I don't have the energy to keep my small household clean. I have to sit down all the time to rest. Sometimes it takes days before I feel strong enough to do the washing up again. If I then have an emotional evening of TV like last night, it becomes even more difficult to get myself up.

If I decide to stay in the armchair to spend the night, the home-knitted woollen blanket provides me with cozy warmth. I usually sleep for a few hours and sometimes even until the next morning. Such nights spent in a recliner are not exactly beneficial for the next day. This is because my head tilts to the side or forwards when I sleep and no pillow is able to support my head sufficiently while I sleep. Such an unnatural head position gives me a bad cervical curve the next day. Another inconvenience is my swollen legs. They feel as if they are about to burst.

After all, when I thought about the consequences of a night in a recliner last night, I really pulled myself together to get up on my feet! It was only on the fourth or fifth attempt that I finally managed to stand up. When I finally stood up, I was so exhausted that I wanted to fall back into the recliner. Luckily, my rollator was within easy reach. I immediately pulled the thing towards me so that I could hold on to it with both hands. After releasing the brakes, I walked the few steps slowly and deliberately over to my bedroom. On the way there, I passed the toilet, but I spared myself the trip there because it seemed unnecessary and I didn't think the diaper pants I was wearing were being used enough. Finally it was done. I immediately let myself and my clothes slowly slide into my bed. I didn't even want to change again.

The horizontal position is a real blessing for my legs. The feeling of tension in my calves quickly disappears, but my bladder quickly fills up with the water flowing up my legs. My diaper pants are unable to absorb such a flood of urine. A considerable amount then flows out into my bed. Because of this, the home care person has often had to change my bed linen and even sweep the mattress.