Fading Away

He always wondered what it would feel like to slowly fade away. Now that he was in that position, he just felt that it was boring. All he could do was lie in his hospital bed, his body fully paralyzed. From what he could tell, it must have been midday. The nurses had not shown up yet and he felt the warm sunlight gently touching his chest. The window must have been open as well since he could feel a faint breeze on his bare feet.

But that was the extent of what he could sense. He had no control over his muscles and extremities. He could not open his eyes. He could not even get an erection, as if that would make it better. He was nothing but a vegetable, wasting away in slow motion. All he could do was think.

"If only I could speak," he thought to himself. With his mind imprisoned in his lifeless body, all he could do was receive and listen. All he could feel was the pain when the nurses lifted him up and turned him around. But even the pain was dialed down, almost faint, as if he were experiencing a copy of a copy instead of the real thing.

But this pain was all he could look forward to since it connected him to his world. He could only feel the sun because it must have been quite strong and was burning into his chest. He only felt the wind on his feet because they must have been too cold. Pain was all that connected him to this world. When his mother and father came to visit, he did not feel anything. They might have been touching his hand but they were likely so gentle that he could not sense it.

Once his mother accidentally sat on his arm. He had felt that. And it was such a beautiful feeling of human connection, something he had lost for so long, that he would have cried, if he could.

"How fitting," he pitied himself. Pain was all that his life had to offer. No goals, no vision, no mission. Just pain. If it wasn't painful then it wasn't real.

But he was worried. He had been feeling less and less over the recent months. Every day, the nurses lifted him up and turned him around. At first, he was surprised how painful it was. But as time went on, he felt less and less pain. He thought that he would have gotten used to it but the pain had become so faint that it seemed as if his nerves were fading away.

But he could still feel the sunlight and the wind every once in a while. Warm and cold. Maybe he could feel them because they were connected to strong temperature changes, he wondered. But who knew. It was all the joy he had left. Pain.

The doctors could never figure out what was wrong with him. When he was 15, he started getting sick more frequently. Sometimes a fever. Sometimes a gut infection. The doctors at the time said it was normal but then the duration of the illnesses increased. What was a day became a week. What was a week became a month. And what was one month became many months.

Persistent fevers. Persistent pain. Persistent everything.

The doctors were clueless but it got worse. When he was 18, he collapsed on a weekly basis. His body would just go limp even though he had a very fit and healthy appearance. His muscles would start shaking even though he was very athletic and well trained.

But he endured. He kept living his life and he lived it well. The collapses were not frequent enough for him to stop living his life.

When he was 20, he collapsed daily. This was when it became serious since he had to be careful where he went, what he did and who he was with every second of every day. He could not drive. He could not ride a bicycle. And he could not walk on hard surfaces without protection since one collapse could have him lose all his teeth on the asphalt.

Life had become an obstacle course. His parents were taking turns being with him and driving him to doctors, to University, to the gym. As soon as he had become an adult, he was back to being treated like a toddler.

But his parents had been right, which was the worst part to him. They had been right to worry about him. They had been right to help him. Without them, he would have probably already drowned in a puddle somewhere. Or in his own blood after smashing head first into the sidewalk. They had been right to be scared. He was scared too.

The doctors kept commenting how they had never seen something like that. It was not epilepsy which was the obvious choice. It wasn't nystagmus or any known nervous system disease. It was no brain tumor or any kind of tumor for that matter. They could not find anything wrong with him.

They kept repeating that it was as if his body simply shut down at random intervals. His brain would just turn off and his muscles and body functions were gradually fading as if his genetic code had given the command to shut it all down. The grand closing. Buy everything at a discount - it all must go! We are liquidating!

That's how he ended up here, in his comfortable hospital bed. He had been hospitalized when he was 22. At least that was the last thing he could remember. The daily collapses became more frequent until they were hourly and then they came so often that there had been no point in getting up anymore. He only lifted up his upper body at times just to fall back down.

But he could still move and talk. He could still see. But all this went away shortly after.

He just remembered hearing his parents arguing. It had been about providing him with the proper care. "He should be here, so we can take care of him!" his mother shouted. "We are both working and the nurses are better equipped and trained for this," his father quietly responded. Jack could hear his father's voice trembling. "This was rare," he thought.

His father was usually composed at all times. Jack could not remember a single time he had heard his father cry or even laugh out loud. He was always calm and collected.

But he knew that his parents had loved him. Both of his parents had had great careers. His father was an astronaut and his mother worked at a large investment bank. They had had great careers and also managed to be great parents on top of it. But with a son that turned into a full-time burden, they had not had much of a choice.

They had tried everything they could. Both took months off from work. They had spent almost all of their life savings on medical fees and treatments. They had never hesitated to find a solution. And Jack knew that they would both have given their lives for him in a heartbeat. But they had been exhausted by then. It was hard to imagine how much of a toll this could take on a parent. To see their only child dying before their eyes and to throw all their resources into the world to find a solution, just to get a legion of shrugs back.

They had aged decades in just a few years. They had looked tired. They had looked as pale as he did, he remembered.

The doctors told them that they did not know if he was conscious or not. To them, he was nothing more than a warm pillow that needed to be fed through a tube, washed every few days and needed its feces drained occasionally. This was not what an astronaut and an investment banker should be doing. And even though they were arguing, they both had known it. And even though they both had loved him dearly, they both had known they had to let him go.

Life was not fair. But it had never claimed to be. It just was.

Shortly after, his parents decided to move him to the hospital. And that was where he lay now.

They had visited him often. First every day, then every week. His mother still visited him weekly, every Sunday. She never missed it. When she came to visit, he usually only heard her say "Hello, honey," followed by silence and then weeping. Every Sunday.

He kept thinking how hard Saturdays must have been for her. He wondered if she needed the Saturdays to be ready for the gut-wrenching and soul-ripping experience every Sunday held for her. To see your son dying in front of your eyes. His lifeless body that cannot move, speak or even look at you. To not know if that thing in front of you was your son anymore.

But she had never given up. She had started holding his hand the second she entered the room and kept holding it for at least two hours until the moment she left. That was love.

His father did not visit as frequently. He was an astronaut so he was in training camps or on space missions much of his working hours. Jack was immensely proud of his dad. He had been among the first manned Mars missions and had been to the planet twice already. He had been preparing for the third time.

Jack always begged his father to bring him a Mars stone. Since he was 12 years old he had kept nagging his father for it. What did he want for his birthday? A Mars stone! For Christmas? A Mars stone?

Maybe Jack was an unusual child but he didn't remember ever asking for any other present than a Mars stone. Maybe it was because he was so proud of his dad. Maybe he just knew that he wouldn't have been able to get it. Or maybe he had just enjoyed the discussions about Mars with his dad. Whatever it was, he must have been very persistent since his father had once lashed out at him telling him to never ask again.

"Well, I guess he could be emotional," Jack thought to himself.

It wasn't that his dad was coldhearted. Astronauts had not been allowed to bring any objects back from their Mars missions and could have risked their job or even prison if they were caught.

He had heard his parents talk about the third Mars mission when they had visited him together. She had wanted him to stay but he had said that there was nothing for him to do anyway. They had argued a lot about it.

"My silly father," Jack thought. "Mom didn't mean that you could help your son but that you could be there with them." But fathers could be blockheads sometimes. Both had been placed into an impossible situation. Jack's mother just hadn't wanted to be alone while his dad just couldn't bear to be with them.

But Jack had infinite love and empathy for them. Maybe it was the silence of the hospital room or the sensory deprivation of his numbed body but he had just felt at peace.

Jack was sentenced to a life of passivity. "How ironic," he thought. All his life until the age of 22, he had been nothing but active even with all his health troubles. He had started an online business when he was 17 and had dropshipped pet toys all over the world from warehouses in China, India and Russia. He had become very savvy when it came to marketing and had had a beautiful website with excellent customer acquisition strategies.

He had used advertisement tools on all major platforms and had been very engaged in content marketing for organic traffic. He had just become obsessed with viral marketing tactics as his health had started to decline drastically. "What a shame," he thought to himself. He had been about to hit it really big.

He had been young when he had started but within six months, he had generated $5,000 in profit every month. When he had reached the age of 19, his monthly profit had reached €40,000 and he had been generating almost half a million dollars in profit per year. He had been a skilled operator but he had been still young and had had so much to learn.

Unfortunately, that had been as far as he had gone. When he was 20, his business had declined drastically and he had been barely breaking even. He had not had the time or attention to save it. His parents had had excellent careers and good salaries and had been more than happy to pay for all his medical bills but Jack had funneled all of his own money into traveling to the best doctors and experts all over the world. He had done every test and followed every single lead. But to no avail.

He had also loved working out. When he was still able-bodied, he had trained in mixed martial arts almost every day. Especially Brazilian jiu jitsu had been his favorite discipline and he could have rolled around the floor all day with his friends.

He had even gotten an athletic scholarship to play football at one of the top three universities in the country at one point. But this scholarship had quickly disappeared once his health had started to decline visibly.

He had not excelled in everything, though. He had failed many subjects in school that others had found easy. English, history and social studies had been his worst. He just couldn't have focused on learning any of these subjects. It was like his brain had refused to let the knowledge in.

"Well, guess I wasn't perfect after all," he thought to himself while his body was being explored by a fly that had snuck into his hospital room.

And here he lay in his hospital bed. All alone and without any connection to the outside world. Trapped within his own body.

Fading away.