Walking Home

There was a terrible accident, and I was rushed to the hospital.  Just as the doctor glanced up at the clock on the wall to call the time of death, I began to see things from his perspective.  Just a quick drop of the eyelids and a sudden snap of the second hand, and then I was seeing things through his eyes.  I had no memory of my own life and I had no tangible connection to the body lying on the bed, but yet somehow I knew that this migration had taken place.  I was the doctor now.  I went on about the doctor's afternoon rounds, moving from room to room to see the patients as though nothing at all had happened.  Faces smiled up at me from their beds.  People sat up and propped their pillows against the headboards.  The white curtains rippled softly in the cross breeze.  It was turning out to be a pleasant afternoon.  I listened to all of the usual questions.  I nodded to all of the usual answers.

When the doctor's shift was done for the day, I walked home.  It was a quiet, small town road with no sidewalk, just a soft dirt shoulder.  I knew every step of the way.  I knew the mulberry tree where the doctor would sometimes stop and rest in the shade and finish whatever food that he had brought for his lunch in his black tin lunchbox.  I knew the names on all the mailboxes that were posted along the side of the road, all the names that the doctor read every day without thinking as he passed them by.  This was feeling more and more like my life now.  I was settling into the old habits, the comfortable routines.  I turned down a couple of side streets and I arrived in front of the doctor's house.  It was a modest bungalow with a short white fence around the front yard.  The doctor lived there with his mother and his grandmother, and I could hear them in the kitchen fixing dinner as I came in.
 
That night, I read a few passages from the book that the doctor kept on the table beside the bed, and as I was setting aside the book and the doctor's reading glasses, I had a moment to reflect.  It was a nice quiet life, but it was a lonely life, too.  Still I knew that I had chosen this somehow.  I had passed on to this after the turbulent storm of my own life had subsided like a whisper.  This was the calm place that I had reached out for in that last moment.  And as I rolled over and settled in bed and listened to the late summer sounds of the bugs outside in the yard, I wondered where the doctor would go when the time came, where I would choose to move on to when this life was over, what other place would look brighter through the looking glass of mortality.  There would always be a little something missing from every life.  I drifted off, dreaming of it.