✧ SEE THE LIGHT ✧

01 ✧ EVERYTHING, AND THEN NOTHING

— CHAPTER 01 —

EVERYTHING, AND THEN NOTHING

The first step towards you was the most difficult.

It's like when you try to walk in the pool, with water up to your hips. Lifting your foot and moving it forward is so hard, and it's easy to lose your balance. You find it more comfortable to stay where you are, standing still, letting the water hold you up. It's easy there, you feel light, floating. Until you try to move and the water slows you down again.

That's what it was like to get close to you. Tortuous, slow, difficult. Until... Well, I learned to swim. It hadn't occurred to me before, when I was trying to run in the water. Some things only make sense when you try them for the first time. That's what happened to me with you.

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My mom always told me I was going to kill myself while driving, and I'd roll my eyes like 'You're so annoying' or laugh at it.

"It's not going to happen," I'd say. "You exaggerate a lot."

"I'm not exaggerating at all, Helena," she invariably replied. "You have the attention span of a fish, someday you're going to be hit from the side at a crossroads for not looking at who's coming."

"It's not going to happen."

It happened.

I didn't kill myself, to contradict my mom, but I think what happened was even worse. I wasn't alone in the car, and to this day I wonder, why didn't I let him drive? I remember that at the exact moment of the collision (a car hit me from the side at a crossroads, indeed) I was laughing, with 'Hotel California' very loud on the speakers and eating a piece of cake we had just bought at a bakery.

"You're covering the floor with crumbs! And the seat!" My husband complained, his mouth full.

"When we get back, we'll clean it up," I said.

There was no car to clean. The crash, on the passenger side, took us both by surprise, and the next couple of hours is hazy in my memory. I remember feeling a lot of pain in my head and back, and not understanding what had happened; I didn't even know what I had hit myself against, for it to hurt so much. I struggled to take my seat belt off, it had jammed. At some point the ambulance arrived, announced by the siren and lights, but I didn't pay much attention to them. The car hadn't overturned, but it was completely destroyed and had skidded to the side and hit a light pole at the back door. The music kept playing and I turned off the stereo with a punch, not caring if I broke it, because it was irritating me.

"Raphael," I called my husband, and looked at him. He didn't answer me.

He was slumped in his seat, his head drooping to the side and a lot of blood on his clothes and face. His side of the car and his door were destroyed and crumpled. I tried to sit up to grab him, but a sting of pain in the middle of my back made me collapse where I was, crying desperately. I kept calling him and shouting his name to wake him up, until they opened the door on my side and put me on a stretcher, and took me to the ambulance. I don't remember much of what happened next, I don't know if it was because of the pain or the head injury or the state of shock. I know that they took me to the hospital and did tests, and I did not lose consciousness at any time, but I didn't know how to answer the questions they asked me, I didn't fully understand their words. My parents and Raphael's sister showed up, but no one could tell me where or how he was, although I asked again and again. I guessed the answer, simply because they didn't want to reply.