Illusions II: The Adventures of a Reluctant Student (Kindle Single) by Richard Bach Read Free Book Online Page A

 Was this part of my story? So much a struggle, this place. A year from now it would be a memory, but now it was now. I wanted to build myself up again, but not with these problems with doctors and nurses.
       Never lived in a little warren like this, no room to walk, if I knew how to do that. Hour after hour, day after day, a wall-clock hummed, one showed the time, which Sabryna had taught me to read.
       I was like an intelligent alien, knew nothing about this world, but I picked it up fast. Couldn’t stand up, didn’t have the strength to do that. Didn’t have the strength, thank goodness, to eat the hospital food.
       My body had lost a lot of weight. I was starving without noticing. Muscles were non-existent…how had I lost so much of my body so quickly?
       I had to build myself all over again, with no power to walk, if I knew how to do it, no food, no wish to learn what the hospital wanted me to do.
       Yet somewhere, a spirit guide whispered that this is as bad as it could get. It didn’t mention that I could die any time, from the drugs or a lack of them. It told me it was all up to me, now. I had to scrape up the will to live and do something with it.
       The bed was my gravestone. The longer I laid there, the weaker I’d become, till finally it would take all my energy to die.
       It didn’t seem fair, that I was lying on a bed they could simply wheel into the morgue and call my case over. “Survived the crash, but the other things, complications, drugs, killed him.”
       Would I have done better, just lying in the field by Puff? If this was better what would have been worse?
       Dying, it’s peace and joy. Dying is life! I could have laid with my airplane for a few hours and won the delight of dying. Mortals have so much to learn, they think dying is some foe, the worst of ends! Not at all, the poor things. Dying is a friend, bringing us back to life once again.
       I struggled, though, just as if I were a mortal. I would not be a broken one. I had to learn to eat, learn to walk, learn to think and speak. How to run again, how to do calculations in my mind, how to take off in Puff again, fly anywhere, land so softly I’d hear the grass whisking on the tires again. Before that I had to learn to drive again, awfully more difficult, more dangerous than learning to fly again.
       All those essential tasks were halted in my little cell in the hospital. Some physicians, some nurses, they thought this was a quiet place for the injured. They were kind people, the ones I knew.
       I needed to get out of there!
       Sabryna rented a room near the hospital to care for me. Every day she talked with me, listened to my wish to go home, told me one single reality, floating free from the dream: “You are a perfect expression of perfect Love, right here, right now. There is no permanent damage.”
       Without her steadfast awareness of the other side from medicines, would I have died? Yes.
       How could I do it, exhausted, broken, unable to sit up more than 30 degrees without a back brace, a brace that hurt more than sitting up?
       I found I had diseases that one can only contract in a hospital. It took eight lines here to list them. I wrote them, deleted them.
       This person who so disliked physiology and biology that he skipped the courses in high school, was all of a sudden, boiled in the stews of a hospital.
       Don’t tell me about medicines, I want none of them. Yet there I was, asked to take a whole spectrum of them from those who believed in hospitals instead of spirit, and meekly I did as requested.
       Three months in a hospital! I stood this, learned to stand, thought about walking, till finally my willingness to carry my hunger strikes, my unwillingness to follow their wishes, my constant request that they please let me go home, was honored. I didn’t care whether letting me go home was death or life. Just let me go!
       They gave a pass that transferred me to a