I couldn't breathe.
I couldn’t fill my lugs with air and I couldn’t hear my heart beating in my ears.
The panic set in as I tumbled to the ground. I tried for my inhaler that was on the side table but it was all used up. I could feel the pain in my chest and the tears wet my face as I lay there immobile. I couldn’t form coherent sentences or make sense of what was happening. There weren’t any thoughts in my head or plans or images, it was just blank. My vision became spotty with black dots.
I started to feel light and then the pain was gone, just vanished like it was never hurting me. That’s when the white light entered my vision; it was all I could see. I felt myself wrapped in sudden warmth and my mind played a little story behind my closed lids.
It was a story of a boy and a girl in middle school. The girl was sitting in the class room laughing and talking loudly with friend instead of doing the class work. In walked a boy and presented his class schedule to the teacher. While the teacher looked the paper over the boy looked around and his eyes set on the only girl who wasn’t staring at him, in fact she hadn’t even noticed him. The girl noticed her friend trying to discreetly tell her to look towards the front of class but the girl was too impatient and wanted to tell her friend something before she forgot it. Still she looked towards the front to see a boy staring at her but then not really caring looked back towards her friend but then quickly snapped her eyes back to the boy. Needless to say it was love at first sight. A couple weeks later his tanned cheeks were a light pink as he asked her out.
The next story was of the same girl only she was three years younger, in elementary school.
Today was the first day at her first baby sitter. The only reason she had to get a baby sitter was because her parents wouldn’t be home to watch over her in the morning. She was scared and wanted to look her best. Her dad was taking her, you could tell by the way she acted that she didn’t very much like her father. She watched timidly as he knocked on the door. A middle aged Spanish woman opened the door and invited them in. They stepped through the threshold and closed the door behind them. The girl stood timidly by her fathers’ side as he talked over payment and care. She wanted the little baby girl crawling in the other room. The smell of baby food, diapers, and cereal filled her nose. Oddly enough she loved the way it smelled.
On the side of the lobby a closed door, it suddenly opened and through ran an older girl quickly followed by a boy the same age. The room was a bathroom with two doors, giving it two entrances and exits. The older girl ran past the girl and her father without even glancing at them but the boy... He stopped the moment his eyes connected with the girl. This would be her first real crush.
Moment’s passed in my eyes of this little girl with both boys. Admiring one from afar and holding the other close. In each memory the three kids grew older and older. I knew I knew these kids from somewhere but it wasn’t until the first boy kissed a familiar girl that I realized that this was my life with Jonathan and Ricardo playing through my mind. A life I had come to love even if it meant being torn to pieces inside, this was a life I didn’t want to be without. A life I wanted to protect at all costs.
I could hear voices in my head.
“Para siempre, no importa que pase, siempre te amara. Nunca duda eso, baby. I’ll always be here. Like the sky I’ll never go away, whether the sun is shining or the moon is looming over.” Forever no matter what, I’ll always love you. Never doubt that, baby.
“I’m always around, Elmo. Mi ojos siempre estan viendo te y mi corazon siempre esta con tigo. Aunque no lo parezca. Créame.” My eyes are always watching you and my heart is always with you. Even though it doesn’t seem like it. Believe me.
“I’ll never be good enough to be his, I know that. I try to change it but there facts. I just have to accept that.”
“Don’t kid yourself. That boy loves more than he loves his own mother.”
“When you see your mate everything changes. Your reason for living becomes for her sole purpose, almost like you don’t exist without her. You’ll jump off a bridge if it makes her happy. You become anything and everything she needs, you never think twice about it. It’s not like love at first sight; thought humans experience it like that. For us it’s different. Our mates are the reason we breathe.”
“No matter how many times you hurt me I continue to love you. I wish it wasn’t like this. I wish we could just love each other full heartedly and not be scared of what the future brings.”
“He loves you. He is crazy about you. He is just scared; scared you might break his heart. You get tired of so many things and move on faster than you can say it. Once you get something you want you get sick of it and throw it out like last years expired milk.”
They were memories of conversations. I couldn’t recall exactly who said those though. I can’t remember anything. The pain in my chest returned and began eating me alive.
I felt my body curl up into a ball and for the first time I felt movement. My eye lids were so heavy. I felt like a lead sinker near the eye of a fishing hook hanging from the fishing pole. Suddenly I was falling in the freezing water. There was a warmth about it though. Like a cold front and a warm front meeting up at my body. Combing and twisting until I was in the middle of a tornado.
Everything was swirling. Ruined images and conversations played, twirled and danced before hiding the sandy bottom.
I felt so nauseas. I could feel the tears pouring from my eyes but they mixed in with the water and were lost at sea.
The coldness became over bearing making the water freeze. A memory played out in front of me; Ester, Alejandro, and Carmen having a heated whispered argument on the very far side of the small wolf village. No one noticed them and I didn’t care enough to keep my eyes on them so I quickly looked away after I recognized them.
The memory grew blurry until it became fuzzy. The static sounds filled my ears. The unrecognizable image grew dim, blacked out, came back, and grew dimmer. Each time the static grew worse. The same thing repeated multiple times until the image black out and the static disappeared.
I was left staring at the black screen with absolutely no noise. I felt like a fruit hanging in suspension in gelatin.
Only this was more solid. It was frozen ice, a frozen tornado and I was in the middle of the eye.
The top began to cover over until I had no way to escape. The tornado became translucent until it literally became ice. Through the ice I could see the blue of the sky growing closer but somehow the sun was shining not too far off though the sky around it was clearly dark and starry. The blue sky grew closer and closer but the sun never twitched.
The blue sky suddenly came to a halt and voices evaded the serene quietness.
“She’s dying.” A lame female voice stated.
“Good. This takes care of our problem for us.” A voice said rather happy.
“Ricardo’s going to feel this in a second. We should get moving.” A different, deeper voice suggested.
“Once she’s out the way it’ll be way too easy to take care of Ricardo. We won’t have to worry about Jonathan unless he decides to track her here.” The happy voice planned.
“I don’t want” the lame female voice began sadly but roughly “Ricardo to die. How about we just keep him prisoner somewhere?”
The voice came through the ice made tornado. Suddenly the sun began moving, as did the sky. They began towards me, slowly at first. The voices disappeared and that’s when the sun and sky began to speed forward. The sun loomed directly overhead making me flinch at his brightness.
I could hear something trying to penetrate the ice but it was no use.
Memories began flooding back into me and I found myself repeating the same things. I have to live. I need to live. Ricardo and Jonathan need me. I have to find out who tried to kill them. I can drop dead once I catch them. I know who did it! Now let me live!!! I need to live!! I will live!
I felt a rocket launched through my body. The ice tornado melted and collapsed I braced myself for impact to the unforgiving Earth but the sun held me in its warm embrace. I watched the blue sky run towards me and the sun unknowingly raced towards the sky.
Just inches before they came in contact I could feel the electricity burst from the sun, myself, and the sky. The electricity collided with one another. The sky and the sun collided angrily. But when the sun and the sky connected sending them both colliding into me it was different.
I could feel a burst of energy run through my body. The pain in my chest not only evaporated but completely healed up good as new like a new born babies. The indescribable sensation that washed through me was over whelming. So much flooded through me it was impossible to keep up.
The one thing I did manage to catch was the sensation of complete and utter happiness.
It was like standing in a clearing full of untouched precocious flowers and a water fall a few feet away with the sun directly overhead. The sounds of birds chirping and water running, like one of those moments you would see in a Disney princess movie. The warmth filled my heart over and over enough to keep me alive for ten life times.
And still, that description would never do this sensation justice.
This was one of those once in a millennia, if you’re lucky, kind of moment.
A cold breeze attacked my body and I became aware that I was no longer in that moment. I became aware that my body was pressed against two incredibly warm beings. I forced my eyes open but I couldn’t open them more than a slit.
I saw only darkness but I knew if I could manage to lift my head up I would see two people. Mumbles were all I could manage to hear but I knew there were happy arguments going on, which made no sense to me. I could also feel my body being pulled back and forth, which didn’t help the nauseous that washed over me once again.
I forced my head up enough to see Ricardo holding me bridal style and Jonathan trying to take me away from him. I knew this wasn’t good, Jonathan being here, but I felt too sick to make a fuss.
“Next time,” They froze and looked down at me. I couldn’t make out the expressions on their face but I felt the shock through their bodies. “Don’t let me get so close to death.”
A sudden darkness overcame me. Too weak to hold it up, my head flopped back over Ricardo’s arm. I could vaguely hear them trying to get me to wake up but the overwhelming sensations did just that, overwhelmed me and I didn’t have the will power to fight it anymore.
But I wanted to sleep because I had a reason to stay alive.
Siblings can’t be trusted.