When i walked alone on that sidewalk this morning It was if i could almost feel something odd, like it wasn't right. I pondered about how maybe I left something on after i left the house that morning or possibly i had tightened my belt to tight. Whatever thought that ran through my mind I know for a fact that I never thought of this...
My name was Daniel Hughes I was once a 28 year old man living in what I thought as both the best and the worst city in British Columbia Canada. My life started like any other through my mother she was everything to me, she was my guide in life she raised me alone by herself because my father didn't want to have another child so he ran the day that I was conceived.
For most of my early childhood I wondered why my mother seemed ok with that. Why she had accepted that, why she would accept less. She told me that to her I was proof that life was good, that it wasn't all bad. She told me to love life regardless of the struggle because it was the only one we had.
And so like any child in this world i played, I laughed and I cried though most importantly I lived a life free. Free from the trauma that my forefathers had once lived because my mother would not rest before she new that I was safe.
I never truly understood what she had to do to keep me safe, to keep me innocent. Though I would learn bits and peices as time ran its course. because the city were we lived was not for the kind For example even though we lived in a city were some days people would dance in the streets others would would drugs newborns with fent for kicks.
Not to mention You had law enforcement doing drugs with 12 year old kids.
Yet to me it was home I didn't see the shit in the streets I saw the birds flying and singing free. We're kids my age were getting stabbed dying or getting high I was at home watching a show with my mother. Because I was safe I was loved.
this all came to a point to when i was 16 I just got home from ben Dover high-school on a Tuesday afternoon to find the apartment quiet the lights in the living room were on i didn't know who would be here at this time my mother should've been still at work yet as i turned th corner and saw her sitting there on the couch i knew that my life was going to change.
The next couple started passing by in blur. I had started to pack things as my mother layed in her bed crying in pain as she thought about what she learned. As I wheeled her into the hospital three days later I couldn't think it was out of nowwhere i felt scared for a moment before she smiled at me said "dont worry danny ill ok just you wait before you know it itll be your birth day and everything will ok , ill be there ".
As I stared into her eyes i felt myself relax what did know that she didn't no matter happend in the past she was always ok this wouldn't be any different was what i thought to myself.
Months would go by and I would start moving forward i had pushed myself to finish my schooling as quiclky as I could I joined countless different clubs and classes trying to find something that would take some time out of my day so that I wouldn't have to feel what I felt or more accurately what I felt I should have been feeling.
I as in a complicated emotional state at the time I knew what I should have been feeling like i was drowningin pain or at least I should've been acordding to books that i had read yet i had felt perfectly fine it was if all my sadness and pain had already gone away like leaves in the wind.
Everyday I go see my mother in the hospital as she slowly withered away in Palliative care I could see how much it hurt her to see me see her like that, so much so that she told me to go to stop coming to see her so often.
She looked at me with her sickly gaunt face and smiled said that I knew how much I meant to her and that she didn't want me to wallow in the loss like she did when my grandmother died. So I listened like i away i did.
it was on my seventeenth birthday that she whispered to me that she made it. I had asked her to repeat what she said as I didn't hear her fully.
She struggled to sit up grabbed my hand and said "I made it Danny I made it" with tears in her eyes as she cried she said to me "I promised didn't I, I promised I'd make it to see your birthday" and she reached over to her right bed side table and grabbed a small box and put into the palm of my hand and closed my fingers around the small black box.
I felt her go too sleep her hand still over mine I stood up and put her hand on her bed kissed her forehead and left the room.
The next day after-school I felt the urge to go see her even though I normally only visit once every or so days to let her build up the courage to let me see her. I had gotten asked if I could join the musical my teachers wife was putting together i said I would ask my mother so grabbed the papers and started walking to the nearest bus stop that was near my school and sat down to wait as the bus started driving to the nanaimo regional.
As I was at walking down the side-walk that leads to the doors of the hospital i got a call from my mother's sister Glenna and I knew that she was gone. I'd later find out that she had started breathing wrong couldn't get air into her lungs so went with her wish that she had signed awhile back. They gave her so much sedation so she could pass on asleep.
When i walked into the room and saw her body laying still i heard odd sound for through my throat it sounded like choked out cry like scream it wasn't loud though or so I was told yet I knew I wouldn't forget the time we had together.
And so life kept on going eventually after high-school I had joined as a dock hand at my local port and started working. At about the time I was 23 I had made enough money to fund a diffrennt carrer something that i wanted to try for a while, i had remembered when I was starting out I had done some work for who's now a buddy of mine named jon.
I had wanted to see if I could go do some scaffolding work for him I knew that it would be much different work than what i was currently doing but I wanted to feel that sense of freedom again the wind in my hair as I slowly climbed up the rivets on a scaffholds standards, I wanted to do something fun so I did and thats how we get to where I was about 5 years later.
7 hours ago walking to my job sight I had become a Forman for a company based out of prince George and I was currently working in van on setting up some scaff on a high rise hotel as it needed some repairs due to failing a previous inspection in some of the electrical lines,
As I was walking up the stairs to the top of the sixy five meter or so scaffholding so I noticed that my boot had come undone so I leaned downward to tie my laces when suddenly a gust of wind blew into me from the east and plunged me into the side railing of the scaff as my mind raced as I slammed into the railing realized that I hadn't hammered in the pin on the other side of the railing and then I fell to my what I thought was my death...
And just as I was about to hit the ground i stopped mid air like someone hit a pause button in a video game i heard booming commanding voice yell out to me from what seemed like nowwhere yet also at the same time all around me it said to a sentence that to this day I still have trouble believing.
It said "DO YOU WANT TO LIVE ?
I couldn't speak I realizes I wasn't even breathing in the moment yet the being still heard me scream from the deepest parts of my mind it heard me and then everything changed as my mind let out a roar that sounded like lightning
... I DO..