Reflection

My first memory of this world was of me lying in a dingy little ward of a public hospital with tubes sticking all over my body. There lay my wreathed body, motionless and senseless. I could see a group of people clad in white overalls walking around me and discussing primarily in a medical jargon which my atrophying ear failed to decipher. As I looked around at the almost flat cardiograph, I could hear only one statement, "Only a miracle can save him now....."

The status quo was maintained for a while, as I held on to my dear life through tubes and pills. But instead of lapsing into comatose, I actually started feeling better and eventually I was discharged from the hospital. I lived alone on top of a small hill by the brook or so I was told by the person who dropped me to my shack. With every passing day, I started feeling younger, my body was no longer swathed in wrinkles and I started feeling stronger. I took up a job of a cornhusker in the valley, to make ends meet. It was over here that I made some good friends, with whom I would sit after dusk and share stories about our lifes - most of my stories were very brief and current.

It took me 5 years to realise that something was not normal. While my close buddies, were getting weaker and smaller, I was actually getting healthier. Not that I complained, but it stayed beyond my comprehension. But such perceptible changes seldom go unnoticed, as the villagers around me soon noticed this strange phenomena and distanced themselves from me. Over the next 10 years I got younger and younger. My hair started turning from white to grey to blackish. I gained a little height and definitely a lot of weight. My vision improved, but my social life shrunk to a point, as people outcast me from their society and considered me to be some kind of a curse.

Thus, I moved to a different town. But it didnt take many years for my abnormality to surface out and I faced an exile in a short time, in most villages that I moved. Banished to a nomadic existence, I lived my life in solitude. I had pets which would live with me and die, but my health would only get better and better. Many moons ago, when I left the hospital after recovering from a near death experience, someone told me that I was 87. I should have been 147 today, but my new friends think that I am in my late 20's. As I turned fitter and younger with every passed day, I wished someone would give me an inkling of what was in store.

Soon I was a teenager, and I still continued my forced vagabond lifestyle scrouging for food and clothes. I knew the clock was running out on me and soon I would find it hard to fulfill my basic necessities. As my voice turned kiddish, and I grew shorter I had to resort to begging on the streets. Often times as I would sleep on the streets under open skies, I would look up to the stars and wish I could travel to them. I used to think people there were like me, and they wouldn't hate me. But the first ray of sun would jolt me back to reality.

However, things changed one nite, when in an undercover operation, the moral police of the city snatched underprivileged children like yours truly, and placed them in an orphan house. I was 3-1/2 ft tall when I entered the charitable house, and within a year I shrunk to 2 ft. Alarms were raised, doctors and miracle workers were brought in to investigate this phenomenon. But they all resigned to something supernatural as I was finally transferred to an infant nursing home. By now, I had profound memories but no speech. Through my monosyllabic language I tried to communicate with the world and tell my sorry tale, but to no avail.

As I lay tonite in the incubator, chugging volumes of oxygen, I am still unsure whether I would wake up tomorrow morning to see the world. In the middle of all the commotion around me, I hear two doctors standing next to me mutter, " Only a miracle can save him now ....". As I heard this a wry smile spread across my lips.