Am I Still Dreaming?

Can I write something that is not poetry?

         I don't know how he got there. He just is and I am there to visit him. I know this is not the first time I have been there to see him. I don't know how I know this, I just do. Normally they do not let me go to his room to see him, but bring him to a play area for our visit. The girl on duty must have been new. She led me to his room to get him. She opened the door and I followed. The site that met my eyes was so heartbreaking I was shocked speachless for a moment. The first thing that brought me out of my shocked state was his mumbling. If you didn't know him, you would not understand what he was saying. I know him. He was singing. He loves to sing. Most of the words to the songs he sings are not clear or the wrong word, but he has the tune. I know the song he is singing. We have sang it together many times. "Somewhere Out There". It is a song that has a special meaning to us. My heart squeezes with love for him. The second thing I hear to bring me out of my shocked state is the girl apologizing to me for the mess. It is this mess that has caused my shocked state of mind to start with. He is laying on the bed, naked, with nothing covering him. The bed sheets are rumpled and covered in smeared fesses, as is his naked body. His scrotum is swollen to the size of an orange, which is huge on his skinny, seven year old body. He looks thinner, bonier then I remember. I reach down and pick him up, holding him to my chest. As his scrotum touches me, his hips pull back as if it hurt to touch, but he does not pull the rest of his body away from me. I whisper in his ear, jibberish only he and I would understand. My eyes gaze around the room, over the girl trying to clean up the mess, to the filthy bed, and up to the walls covered in black drawings, if you could call them drawings. They look more like scribbles. He loved to draw. He would always draw things in detail, using lots of colours. Looking at these black markings, covering the walls, makes me feel his pain and fear. I take his face in my hands and look at him, look at his eyes. There is nothing there. He stares at me, still mumbling his song, as if he is empty, lost. I say his name and his body twitches, but his eyes are still hollow. My body wanted to sit down on the floor, rocking him and cry, but I know inside of me, now was not the time to lose my strength. I picked the blanket from the floor, wraping it over his naked, thin body and stood. I turned to the girl, telling her to put his things in a bag, now. She stops and stares at me, then starts to say she needs to go get someone. I block her path to the door and tell her, to do it now then we will go find someone. She was young, weak, like I use to be. She finds a bag on the closet shelf and starts putting his clothes in it. I tell her not those things, but his papers, drawings that are scattered around the room. I lay him gently back onto the bed. For a moment, his body seemed to cling to mine, though his arms did not hold me, but only hung limp at his side. I found the camera I had brought with me, to take pictures so I could see him when I wasn't visiting. I took pictures of him laying on the filthy bed and of the walls. Putting the camera away, I pick up his stuffed giraffe, that I gave to him before he left the hospital of his birth, and scooped him back into my arms. Before we leave his room, I take the folder from the rack beside his door and put it in the bag she put his papers in. I told her we were leaving. He was not staying in this place one day more. She started to mumble again that she needed to go get someone, and stopped talking at my glare. I asked her, would she let a child, her child, that she had carried in her body, felt grow inside of her, feed at her breast her mothers milk, care for in sickness, laughed with in the joy and wonder of life, held during a storms or after a bad dreams; would she let someone she loved stay in a place like this, in this condition, and think it was healthy. She looked back at the room, sighing and shook her head, no. I said, "We are leaving. You can go get someone, or stand here thinking about going to get someone, but easy or hard, I was not leaving my son here and no one would stop me from leaving without him". I turned and walked down the hallway to the garden door and out into the sunny air. Other people were in the garden, sitting with their loved ones. No one noticed me. I walked around the building to the door leading into the entrance, I had only, less then an hour ago, entered to visit with my son. The lady at the desk there, looked up at me. She asked me if I needed help. I said no, we are going home and turned away from her shocked face to the front door, leading out of this place that I never wanted to see again. I could hear her calling me to stop, wait, but I walked on, down the path and through the front gates, across the parkinglot to my van. I buckled him in and turned back to the building just as a group of people came running out the doors, toward me. I went around the van and got in, ignoring their yells for me to stop. I started the engine and drove away. I could still hear my son mumbling his song, calming me. I had to think, where to go first. Do I take him to the hospital, to a lawyer, here or drive home to my hometown and take him to people I know. The words to the song that my son sings, swim in my head and I start singing with him. "Somewhere out there if love can see us through, then we'll be together, somewhere out there, out where dreams come true........ ". Home. We will go home. All roads lead you home and there is no place like home. I drive, shaking with what I have seen, but determined that he will not go back. I still do not know how he got there. My mind is not letting me see that memory, only that I was strong enough to take him away from that place, not weak as I have been in the past, going along with what others, in authority, tell me is the thing to do, but going with my own instinct of what is right. He is my son. I love him.

~*~*~*~*~*~Lady Bee~*~*~*~*~*~