... Dreams can be
very realistic. From what I remember, I started off lying in a small,
sterile bed in a nondescript room, with a searing pain in my hip. I knew
that the man standing just out of my peripheral vision had hurt me, had
stung my left hip with his scorpion tail. I knew that I had been
poisoned, and that I didn't have much longer. I think I must have asked
him, because then I knew that I had 18 minutes left to live. Not 20, not
15, exactly eighteen minutes. So I lay there, slightly
hyperventilating, and then I looked over at my teacher. She had been
sitting there, facing away from me at her desk from senior year English
class all along, grading or doing something equally important. She
turned around in her swivel chair, motherly and concerned, and I asked
her self-consciously if she would tell my family that I loved them. When
she said 'of course' in her sweet way, I asked if she would tell my
parents that I loved them, tell my friends. I guess I was finished
speaking then, because she looked at me, reassuring and sympathetic and
mournful, and turned back around to her desk to continue her work. I
turned my head back and lay there, thinking of what else I would have
said to her had I thought of it while she was still turned around, and
then the man with the scorpion tail came into my line of vision. He
walked around to the left side of the bed from the right, passing my
teacher's desk, and smirked at me; though I wouldn't call his expression
cruel. So he smirked, said "Eighteen minutes left...", lay down on the
bed next to me. I was surprised, shied
away. What was he doing? I wanted to ask, but before I could finish my
first word, his scorpion tail had snapped out again and pierced me for a
second time in the hip. "Plea-" was all I got out before indescribable
pain ran throughout my pelvis. I think my back arched, and then I was
dead.
But I was also awake, eyes stretched wide in the darkened room. I was so utterly grateful that I had not died at the hands of the scorpion man, so completely filled with relief that I would have another chance at my last words, that I cried. ... You know what's funny? The day before, I'd fallen down the stairs in my rush to get to class on time... I have a huge bruise on my left hip.
But I was also awake, eyes stretched wide in the darkened room. I was so utterly grateful that I had not died at the hands of the scorpion man, so completely filled with relief that I would have another chance at my last words, that I cried. ... You know what's funny? The day before, I'd fallen down the stairs in my rush to get to class on time... I have a huge bruise on my left hip.
So there's most of the post. I realized that I have always been melodramatic, and peculiar. After that initial thought, I wondered what made the infamous last words of a dying person so vitally important. Shouldn't their entire life speak for them rather than a few lungfulls of words spoken in the last seconds? Maybe we're all just kind souls and want to comfort the living once we're gone. Or maybe we've got a vendetta to settle, or something, and blurt it out when push comes to shove. I dunno, and I suppose I won't find out until I'm about to die. And by then it'll be too late. Maybe my last words will be about last words! I shall be famous upon my death, for finally clearing this debate up once and for all! ...
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