Read Online Not Fade Away: A Memoir of Senses Lost and Found by Rebecca Alexander, Sascha Alper - Free Book Online
Authors: Rebecca Alexander, Sascha Alper
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always loved todance and to sing. My brothers and I loved to perform. We played the piano and were always in the school musicals. When I was younger and my hearing was still strong enough to clearly hear all of the words, I loved to make up my own choreography to my favorite songs, and my friends and I would spend hours creating intricate dance routines. As I became a teenager I started listening to all kinds of music: hip-hop, rap, classic and alternative rock. There was nothing I loved more than the sound of a good beat.
I adored camp and school dances: My friends and I would listen eagerly to hear which song would be played next, and when one of our favorites came on we would yell and scream with excitement, singing along while waving our arms in the air and throwing our hair around. I loved, too, the moment when a slow song would come on, the first strains of it sending my stomach into knots as I wondered who might ask me to dance.
I believe that dancing is one of humanity’s greatest gifts. It allows you to feel and express so many different emotions. When you see someone dancing without inhibition, no matter how silly or outrageous they might look, one thing is certain: They are truly living in the moment. Nothing feels better to me than my body matching the rhythm of a song; I might not be able to make out the lyrics anymore, or sometimes even the tune, but I don’t need my eyes and ears to feel the bass pounding through me, and I don’t need to see or hear well to dance. When I first hear or feel music, a signal goes right to my shoulders, and before I know it I am well on my way to starting a dance party.
• • • •
That night, though, before we went to the club we had been hanging out in a park nearby, passing a bottle of Smirnoff, whichDaniel’s girlfriend Lesley and I drank most of. I was always a lightweight and never much of a drinker, so by the time we made it into the club and onto the dance floor I was starting to feel the effects. I went to the bathroom and could tell by my wavy reflection that I was wasted. Within minutes, I was stumbling, unable to dance or even form a coherent thought. The bouncer had his eye on me and soon asked my friends to get me out of there. Cody and Daniel practically had to carry me out, and, even though I was totally out of it, I could see that Cody was angry. He wouldn’t talk to me on the ride home, and didn’t say good-bye when we dropped him off, and that’s the last thing I remember, though Lesley told me later that she had walked me upstairs and gotten me into bed. I woke up several hours later, around four thirty A . M ., still drunk and desperate to pee and get some water, and stumbled out of bed.
I still don’t know if what happened next was from the booze or my degraded vision, or, most likely, some combination of both. My night vision already sucked, and I couldn’t see a thing as I lurched out of bed. I felt my way along the wall, struggling to find my door, but I was so disoriented that I had no idea where it was. I started to panic and moved more frantically, my drunk brain unable to help me find even this most familiar of routes. I fumbled by my French windows—I don’t know if I actually turned the big handle to open them or whether they had already been open, but as I became more and more turned around, desperate to get out of my room, I managed to back up against my large, open window (honestly, I think I might have been trying to sit down on the ledge, perhaps thinking I had finally found the toilet) and fell backward more than twenty-seven feet onto the flagstone patio behind our house, landing, miraculously, on my left side, breaking almost everything but my head and neck. Mere inches and my story would have ended right there.
I don’t know how long I lay there, probably only a minute or two, but even my quiet wails were becoming too much for me when, in an extraordinary stroke of luck, a neighbor who lived behind us, a cop just getting
I adored camp and school dances: My friends and I would listen eagerly to hear which song would be played next, and when one of our favorites came on we would yell and scream with excitement, singing along while waving our arms in the air and throwing our hair around. I loved, too, the moment when a slow song would come on, the first strains of it sending my stomach into knots as I wondered who might ask me to dance.
I believe that dancing is one of humanity’s greatest gifts. It allows you to feel and express so many different emotions. When you see someone dancing without inhibition, no matter how silly or outrageous they might look, one thing is certain: They are truly living in the moment. Nothing feels better to me than my body matching the rhythm of a song; I might not be able to make out the lyrics anymore, or sometimes even the tune, but I don’t need my eyes and ears to feel the bass pounding through me, and I don’t need to see or hear well to dance. When I first hear or feel music, a signal goes right to my shoulders, and before I know it I am well on my way to starting a dance party.
• • • •
That night, though, before we went to the club we had been hanging out in a park nearby, passing a bottle of Smirnoff, whichDaniel’s girlfriend Lesley and I drank most of. I was always a lightweight and never much of a drinker, so by the time we made it into the club and onto the dance floor I was starting to feel the effects. I went to the bathroom and could tell by my wavy reflection that I was wasted. Within minutes, I was stumbling, unable to dance or even form a coherent thought. The bouncer had his eye on me and soon asked my friends to get me out of there. Cody and Daniel practically had to carry me out, and, even though I was totally out of it, I could see that Cody was angry. He wouldn’t talk to me on the ride home, and didn’t say good-bye when we dropped him off, and that’s the last thing I remember, though Lesley told me later that she had walked me upstairs and gotten me into bed. I woke up several hours later, around four thirty A . M ., still drunk and desperate to pee and get some water, and stumbled out of bed.
I still don’t know if what happened next was from the booze or my degraded vision, or, most likely, some combination of both. My night vision already sucked, and I couldn’t see a thing as I lurched out of bed. I felt my way along the wall, struggling to find my door, but I was so disoriented that I had no idea where it was. I started to panic and moved more frantically, my drunk brain unable to help me find even this most familiar of routes. I fumbled by my French windows—I don’t know if I actually turned the big handle to open them or whether they had already been open, but as I became more and more turned around, desperate to get out of my room, I managed to back up against my large, open window (honestly, I think I might have been trying to sit down on the ledge, perhaps thinking I had finally found the toilet) and fell backward more than twenty-seven feet onto the flagstone patio behind our house, landing, miraculously, on my left side, breaking almost everything but my head and neck. Mere inches and my story would have ended right there.
I don’t know how long I lay there, probably only a minute or two, but even my quiet wails were becoming too much for me when, in an extraordinary stroke of luck, a neighbor who lived behind us, a cop just getting
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