“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

” Intriguing it truly is how

Shakespeare could bring out one’s emotions through such doleful words. Nevertheless, it is true. Life
is but an unfathomable tale of sorrow and misery, masked behind the sounds and faces of joy,
leading only to the inevitable revelation of the truth, where one would realize that dreams are but
an empty flask, easily shattered into oblivion.

It came like a spear, prickling my soul. Perhaps it was the blanket being too thin, if only I had added
one, no two, no, it just would not have sufficed. Before then, I had always imagined a campfire to be
the ultimate source of warmth and comfort in dark times… I stood corrected. For all I knew at that
point, I could’ve been lying naked in the midst of a blizzard, unforgiving gelid winds wailing proudly
as they struck despair down to my very core. Accompanied only by a surfeit of queasy sensation
patrolling ceaselessly by my uvular. It was incontrovertibly a one-sided battle. One which no
adolescent should have to fly in the face of without an ally.

It must have been the fever, though one could have erroneously believed the source to be the
merciless wind, howling plaintively across the campsite as it disturbed the rustling leaves, as if on
purpose. The others have gone to restock on more wood to burn and I was left to rest in my tent. I
would have gone with them had I not been cursed with this horrible fever at this wicked hour. Hiding
from the coldness beneath the safety of my blanket was probably not the most courageous act of
the century, but it was a wise one. To follow them into the woods in my condition would be plain
suicide.

Before long, the wind wailed even louder in an utmost sorrowful manner. I reached into my
pocket in search of my pills, my lifeline to be blunt, as it kept my illness to a minimum. Somehow, as
if things could not have gotten worse, they were not there, go figure. That was it, in a matter of
moments the ascending fever would triumph over my natural resistance and incapacitate me, as
would asphyxiation slowly sink in. Right then, on the brink of pessimistic surrender, through the
glass of my memory, a sliver of hope came to be. Percy, they must have still been with Percy! That
fool had asked to ‘take a look’ at them earlier on and must have brought them along with him by
accident, another one of the many mishaps that seem to revolve around him. The solution then,
however, was simply a no-brainer. Suicide or not, retrieving the pills was a must. To endure the
intensifying sickness would be worse than death itself.

With a long, deep, breath and a whole lot of foolish bravery, I rushed out, embracing the tempest
and broke off looking for Percy. The woods grew thicker as both light and warmth from the campfire
dimmed and gradually faded away into cold and black despair.

There was simply no time to adjust to the darkness. I scurried blindly forward towards who knows
where, yelling out the names of my campmates as I shivered in the midst of grieve and fear. I had
just about given up when a shout of familiarity retaliated my efforts, it was of my name and I was
sure the voice had belonged to Percy. My tired eyes lifted in search of the voice despite the
overwhelming darkness. A dark figure sluggishly spawned in the distance and without a moment’s
hesitation, I charged towards it, only to have it let out a scream in return. Vaguely I assumed it to be
in a warning tone. But unfortunately, my inherent insouciance and the desperation for the illness to
end got the best of me. And to be honest, I could not have cared less at that moment what the
scream was all about.
 It all passed in a blur. My foot felt nothingness, my vision descended, adrenaline surged through
my veins, pain marked its attendance completely uninvited, sirens were heard, obscured flashes of
red and blue warned me of the obvious and… what exactly happened next still remain uncharted in
my memory. Was it a hole or a cliff, I could not remember. Medical experts, however, would not
stop stressing how miraculous it was that I even survived the fall itself. But of course, I knew all too
well of their reason behind all the comforting. As the French would say, “C’est la vie.” That’s life, we
have got to face reality, miracles do not just happen every day without a price, and I had paid every
last bit of it. Ever since that haunting, or perhaps fateful day, I had been paralyzed from waist down,
left to live the joyful life that could have been mine only within the moonstream of my imagination.
Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. And now I sit patiently in one of mankind’s oldest
creations, a wheelchair. It’s laughable how this magnificent piece of invention developed by the very
victims of this curse as their renewed hope in life is now my closest companion, clinging to me like a
hook, endlessly mocking my very existence that is stained with my disability. All I could do now is to
share my story every now and then, awaiting nothing but a sad conclusion to my life.