THE GREENMAN

 

I was in the elevator going up in the lift to a ward, from intensive care where I died and rose from a stroke. The porter and nurse waffled on as I saw myself on Stainless steel. 

I looked like something scary I had seen before but there

 was nothing in on my mind. I had a massive stroke that

 wiped clean my left hemisphere, it was hard to get a fix in

 that vegetative state. They glided me beside an exit door, I

 lay there wrecking my broken mind. The nurses gave

 me drugs and left me to get a fix on life, as where I had

 seen that face in the lift appeared again played on my broken

 mind. Life was very surreal, a girl in a yellow uniform

 mopping up beside the bed.

 

I gestured water, I was parched and couldn’t talk and she

 uttered no English in a Balkan tongue and walked away only

 to return with a cup of water. A bit of humanity goes a long

 way. I will never forget her. I lay in a dead state for days, my

 only friend was a little green man above the fire exit door.

 Didn’t know where I was, it was as if they dosed

I with powerful drugs then left alone to live/die.

 

I couldn’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality, that little green man gave me my reason for living, on the ward the patients were dropping like flies. The nurses were there in case but you had to find your own footing. Mine came in the form of a little green man. For days I watched him. That little green gave me a fix on life, I figured out In my broken mind that if there was no green man I was hallucinating. If that little

 green man was there I was in reality. It gave me a fix on life.

 

One summer's day a nurse opened the door to air the ward a waft of greenery woke something in me. I saw the grass and

 the gate cars going by. A google like a map appeared in my

 mind for the first time I knew where I was, at the back of

 Craigavon Hospital and cars were heading up the Bluestone

 the road past lilo church where my mother and sister.

Just a simple little green man woke from a vegetative state. People look for a spiritual substance outside themselves but their determination is in them. That road and the cars going

 by opened a map of Northern Ireland. From that day forward

 I was on the road to stroke recovery. Being taken to another

 rehab hospital,i n the life I saw my reflecion on the cover of 

a Peter Gabriel record cover, I don't remember, I recall.