Pretending

[I wrote this about an year ago. Unedited. Freshly dug out from bighuglabs' Writer]

He's been shot once in the stomach, he believe a guy with the handgun just walked right into the coffee shop and popped a bullet into his body around his lower left rib bone. He could felt the blood slowly and steadily running over his hands covered at the wound. The room looks foggy, everything sounded weird, a drum started somewhere near, so near and loud. His lip going dry and pale, eyes could not concentrate, hands were losing the grip of the wound. The excruciating pain caught up with the breath, each was getting harder to process.

'Can I help you with anything... sir?' The nice lady sitting on the table next to him asked politely, mouth shuddering.

'Oh, I am alright, thanks for asking.' He said plainly, trying to be as calm as he could as he returned from the state of being shoot to sitting comfortably in a cozy little coffee shop drinking freshly brew coffee from the part time girl.

'You looked a little bit, I don't know, pale a while ago. Are you sure you are okay?'

'Yeah Yeah Yeah, I am fine, thanks for the concern.' He sipped the coffee and looked out, avoiding her dubious gaze.

She dug back into her magazine, still unconvinced.

He realized his hand were still resting around the now gone gun shot wound, he was almost reaching the pass out stage in his pretended act. Then the lady decided to step in.

This is kind of an awkward act he would do sometime's when he felt like it, or seen things that made him want to feel that, or some things just stuck him and made him feeling it.

This little acting thing came up when he was reading the famous J. D. Salinger's 'The Catcher in the Rye', where the main character pretend himself had been shot and fooling around with his feeling and emotion. This inspired him to do the same, pretending he was in a difficult situation where he was the victim of crime and been hit with something.

Sometime it was a good old knife stab in the back or falling off a ledger. but mostly is the gun shot act, which he was doing earlier.

It fascinated him that these little act could felt so real, he could almost feel the pain, the bleeding wound, the instability of a person being hit. The brain could only process so much, that after each act, he would feel extremely dizzy and worn off, not wanting to do or talk to anyone, as if he was really hurt.

Not once did he perform such an act in public space either because he was watching or hearing something that triggered his deeper consciousness or he just felt like it. For this act, he was reading about an article talking about how many people where shot each year by some random stranger who had a bullet to waste. It just got him.

Other times when he got too far in his act, he actually freaked someone and made them pass out, or called for police and ambulance.

The act, he supposed, was a way of experiencing the traumas others has been through as to feel what they felt.