Amputate (Gawsten)

6: Dream

My dreams are my only safe place the only place I can go to escape my unchangeable reality. I'm trapped anywhere beyond my dreams.
But that whole escape changes wildly once it's a nightmare. I used to be able to handle them, simply suddenly wake up with my heart racing with sweat slithering down my skin but now it's that but so much worse.

Usually the nightmare is the memory of what happened. Everything my eyes saw. All of it. My loved ones faces staring back at me.
When I was younger I would have nightmares of my family and friends dying, usually turning into dust and flying away right before my eyes.
Now, now I wake up and the nightmare seems to have creeped into reality. Those family members I would go to don't exist anymore. I find myself alone.

So, so alone.

There's no worse feeling than laying completely utterly alone in a hospital bed, drowned in sweat with not even the ability to get up and walk away. Heart racing like the nightmares before.

No escape.

All I have to live for are my dreams. They take me back to the days before this. A heaven in compare.

My only decent option these nights is to search through stars. It's nearly impossible with the smoggy Houston skies. But I search for the balls of gas anyways and overlook the pollution we've put into the air, we've destroyed our planet.
Everything is a broken bone. 

It being 3 in the morning I don't ask someone to help me into my chair no nurse or tech would be so thrilled to help me at this time of night but moving seems like the smart thing to do.
I do something I've only done around four other times in this place. . . Homework.
No not that boring math and English stuff but somehow worse. My stretching exercises.
When I was in high school I would in a heartbeat choose stretches over homework but now it's painful. Homework actually hurts.

I bend my little stubby legs, they look weird. I still can't get used to them I miss the limbs that used to be attached to them. Pain shoots through my body a sensation I've become used to. I think that's enough homework for the day.
Unlike real homework I did some work and achieved nothing. Only pain.

Oh how I wish I could go back to school. Have normal homework again. And of course legs.
I surprisingly drift to sleep and dream of something pleasant this time I wake up only remembering bright colored hair. The dream forgotten and stored deep in my brain.

The nurse shaking my shoulders attempting to wake me up says something that is less of a possible reality than my dreams.

"Wake up Geoff, it's time to walk."

When I said it's time to make my legs work I didn't mean or believe it would be happening now. It can't be. Can it? I've only gotten the slightest movement out of my stubs the past few months how can I control prosthetics and walk? That's impossible.

I wake up completely and realize the nurse is Travis, he has a grin across his face as always but it seems happier and more real today. Can it really be a possibility?
"What do you mean!"

" I mean walking," he pauses as he helps dresses me, "baby steps."

That still doesn't quite explain but I have a feeling Travis isn't going to tell me for whatever reason.

We go through the lengthy process of getting ready transferring from the bed, getting dressed, going to to bathroom, and then he hands me my schedule for today. And there it is. Not quite what I was hoping for,

Locomat robotic Walking : 9:30

But something.
Of course I need a machine to walk.