The only reason people live as long as they do is because they don’t know how to die. If they do know, they are afraid it will be painful. They’re going to die – what’s the point in worrying about pain anymore?

These are my thoughts as I push my way through the doors of Longfellow High School and step out into the dreary evening fog, night swiftly replacing the day. Junior year is…awful, in every sense of the word ever known, and my Calculus teacher decided to pour salt in my wounds by giving me a detention. I was late to class. Now, I must stumble home in the foggy hatred of night. Hardly seems fair.

My Calculus teacher simply doesn’t understand. No one understands the pain of opening my eyes every morning and realizing it’s another day. No one understands the agony of looking in the mirror and despising the person that stares back at me with those mocking blue eyes. And I don’t understand myself. It’s like a suffocating black shroud has been draped before my eyes, leaving me blind to the world that once seemed so familiar to me, but now stands as a prowler in the distant brush. My life, the only one I have been given, is being stolen away from me by an insatiable, greedy force, yet it is a force I cannot see, a force I cannot fight, as much as I wish I could. Life itself is slipping from my grasp, yet it only lay within a fingertip’s reach, and every time I reach out for it, it is yanked away from me, compelling me towards the edge of a great and wide oblivion. It is very beautiful, oblivion. It seems more appealing to me every day.

Plagued by the disease my own mind, I wander along the desolate road. The world in front of me is as cruel, dark and unforgiving as the one around me, yet the only way to go is forward, forward into the uncertainty as I have so many times before, for home lay ahead. Generic happiness and fabricated smiles, and smothered pain are at waiting for me at the end of my journey, my earthly one, anyway. The cosmic one, however, is freeing, and it might be coming sooner than I originally thought it would.

I move to cross the broad, gleaming street, and as I come to the center of it, the beat of a bass fills the air, and all of a sudden the fog begins to brighten. I turn in time to see two burning balls of white light glaring through the mist, and by the time I register the source of this light as a car, it’s too late. And the world disappears.

Sometime later , I’m awoken by the steady pace of a heart monitor, and as my eyes groggily creak open, I discover that I lie in a hospital bed, the sheets tucked up to my chest. I glance upward to see a nurse changing the I.V. in my hand. Her pretty eyes meet mine, and she smiles warmly.

“You’ve been asleep for a while, sweetheart,” she says.

My voice emerges dry and squeaky. “How long?”

“We’ve kept you in a coma for a month. You were in rough shape when they brought you in, Ms. Hawthorne. They actually had you in the ICU for a while.”

This woman is talking nonsense. “What are you talking about?” I demand.

“You don’t remember?”

“No!”

“You were in a terrible car accident,” she says shaking her head. “It was a hit – and – run, but the police caught the driver shortly after you were found. Hold on. I’ll page your doctor.”

The balls of light, the blaring music – the car must have hit me. But I lived. Someone found me and the doctors saved my life. They saved me…

A sudden knock at the door, and I see a seasoned doctor step into the room. He welcomes me with a certain smile as he approaches, as if I have just returned from a long trip, and he stops at the edge of the bed.

“Hello, Ms. Hawthorne. I’m Dr. Jacobs. I’ve been looking after you this passed month. I’ve called your parents to let them know you’re awake.”

“Do you know when I can leave?” I ask, my heart swelling with hope.

I watch his face droop in grimness, and I feel as my heart is shot out of the sky, only to crash and burn. He perches on the bed and gently grasps my wrist in his hand, and I clench my eyes shut, bracing myself for what is sure to be a blow.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, dear. You see, when the car hit you, your lower back suffered most of the impact, and your vertebrae was shattered. We were able to fix most of the damage, but I’m afraid you’ll never walk again.”

I hear what he says, but the words do not register. They simply echo in my ears as I reach down to squeeze my knees, and…I feel nothing. I see my legs, and I know they are mine, but I can’t feel them. They might as well not even be attached to me.

“Never...”

“Never,” he says somberly. “I’m sorry, Ms. Hawthorne.”

Such sadness in his voice. Such woe. I take his hand in mine, the hand of this man, the man that refused to let death have me, and I smile at him, tears streaming down my face.

“I’m alive, aren’t I?”

And as I say it, the truth of my statement is a shock to my system. I am alive. I survived. I survived what has killed other people. These people rescued me – that means my life has to be worth something, right?

My only regret is that it took me this long, and the cost of my legs, to realize that.