Better Choices (bwwm)

T H I R T Y F I V E

FOUR AND A HALF YEARS AGO

I V Y

I'm in my hospital room with stitches and a cast on my body. My body is aching with pain but that's obviously because I just came out of a car wreck.

I don't know how long I've been in here but I do know that the only person that's visited me was Kimani and Isaiah.

My parents have been waiting for Ingrid to get out of surgery, if she's even still in surgery.

I honestly think they forget their 17-year-old daughter was injured too.

Finally after an hour more my dad is barging in.

My mom isn't with him so I'm assuming she went to work so she has enough money to pay off this now incoming hearty hospital bill.

"Get your stuff, we're leaving" He doesn't even try to help me he just closes to door back.

Knowing this how it usually is I take a deep breath and grab my stuff following him out.

I walk past Iris's room and she's on the monitor, she's sleeping I assume but most likely in a coma.

When I get home my dad immediately goes into his room slamming my door and leaving me here to get up the steps myself.

Great.

By the time my mom comes home she explains how Iris is in a coma and she was put into a medically induced one since she already hurt her head before.

That's all I knew and I visited her every day until one day she wasn't at the hospital anymore.

That's when I found out she didn't make it. My dad told my mom and me that she went brain dead. The hospital confirmed it, handing us the paperwork and so much other stuff, and then the funeral came.

It was a closed casket so not even I saw it and then from there in out I just lost a piece of myself.

I R I S

I woke up confused out my ass, I was told I was pregnant and that I was in a crash but I simply didn't remember any of that.

I didn't even remember my own name for a second.

Once I was discharged I left the hospital, 8 weeks pregnant and not knowing anything about myself or my family.

Honestly, I really didn't want to know about them. Whoever my parents were left me.

I'm legal so I didn't need a parent to come to get me, they just let me go.

However, nobody came to get me, and even if I didn't remember them nobody came.

I didn't have an ID, I didn't have anything on me.

All I had was my clothes and a baby so I did what any stupid woman in a lifetime movie would do and I hitchhiked.

It was an old white woman in the car and she asked where I wanted to go.

I guess I was feeling vulnerable and I told her how I just woke up in a hospital with no family or memory and I have a baby and no place to go.

I knew basic math, very faint things but when I thought about family I just see bodies with faint faces.

She decided to take me where she was going, and she was going on a road trip around the united states so I joined her.

I didn't know the lady but she had a golden retriever named Roxy in the backseat and she was just a baby, maybe a newborn.

Over the course of eight months, I traveled with her, all through car.