The Awakening

I should probably finish my first novel before moving on to the second, but I felt that I had a good idea and didn't want to lose it. This is the starting of what could possibly start into my new novel - it's about Dean's dissociation from reality. Enjoy.

It was like he was reborn as someone else when his eyes first opened. They adjusted to the lighting of the hospital bed, blinking, looking around nervously, and he didn’t recognise any of us. He stood up, while we were all shocked that he had finally come out of his four month coma and sank into his bed in fear of the familiar eyes that were staring at him. He wasn’t Dean any longer, not the friend that I remembered growing up with, but with his awakening he became a new person, and he developed a whole new set of ambitions and drives that had turned our town upside down. He re-learned everything as if he was a new born child trapped in a twenty-two year old body, and none of us mattered to him any longer. He pushed off, being one of the only souls trapped in this town to escape, but his destructive drive didn’t allow him to complete the goals he had always talked about.

I remember when we were in grade seven. We met for the first time at the bus stop for school. He introduced me to himself as Dean and I introduced myself, offered him a seat beside me. I found out he lived no further than a block away from me and crossing through the alley behind my house was all it took to give him a visit, so naturally our friendship seemed to grow inseparable. We grew up playing on our block with the neighbour kids, skateboarding, playing road hockey, riding bikes, and more often than not, finding ourselves in subtle mischief that always lead phone calls back to my parents. It was a great time, fantastic memories, but as we aged life seemed to split us in different directions.

We were both young adults trying to advance into our career fields. I became a bank teller with hopes of reaching management and he took his skills into the field of construction. We both met up regularly for drinks and conversation to catch up on things. He had a girlfriend whom he planned on proposing to, I had a long term affair myself, and everything seemed to be going good. We were advancing in life and the future looked promising, but the accident that had caused Dean to dissociate himself was the drawback to our plans. While in a coma, doctors were certain that the brain damage could never heal, he was going to be permanently handicapped, never able to have normal conversation ever again, and in a heat of emotions Jill, Dean’s girlfriend and fiancé left town and refused to be attached to a vegetable for the rest of her life.

It was a sad scene to witness and I felt truly sympathetic for everything that had been happening to Dean, but I promised that I wouldn’t abandon him when or if he ever became conscious of the world ever again. He was my friend, my best friend in fact, and I was determined to try and make his awakening to the world as smooth as I could. What I didn’t know was that a monster would wake from that coma, overtaking the the body of the best friend I had ever known, and turn the world I knew upside down.