Happy Anniversary!
I turn 13 today.
Last night, I attended a Chaplle Roan Pink Pony Club-themed night out. These past two weeks I’ve attended a Bob Ross paint-along, a jazz concert, a free gig under a bridge where old men performed blues (they were amazing, they wore red socks), and a lovely dinner at a new restaurant with a brand new friend. Life this week has been fun and exciting. So why did I wake up this morning feeling horrid - and knowing it was not a hangover?
I get up to wash my face and I count the steps between my bedroom and the bathroom, I’m here, I’m present, why am I feeling confused? I check my emails, my job interview scheduled for Monday - the first one I’ve had since graduating sits proudly up top. I scroll through countless promotions, making sure to click unsubscribe on everything. Why am I feeling dull? The flashy calls of 20% off sales aren’t exciting me.
I check my family group chat, the cat has caught another mouse but luckily my sister manages to save it and it lives to tell the story. I can’t bring myself to smile about this heroic win. What the fuck is happening to me?
A text pops up, I need to check the calendar—31st August.
Aha. I know now.
There are two dates that exhaust me and put me into a state of catatonia. The night before my birthday - 11th June, and the day the accident that changed my life happened - 31st August.
On 31st of August 2011, I was 14 years old. I fell asleep in the car when reading The Kite Runner and I woke up changed in ways I still am coming to terms with.
In two years I will have officially lived longer being sick, disabled, and in constant survival mode longer than I have ever been healthy. This year would’ve been my last year as a normal teenager, and I don’t know how to come to terms with that at all.
Normally 31st of August means I surround myself with as many friends or family. This year I am 300 miles from home, I have cancelled all plans with my lover, and I cannot leave bed.
On the first anniversary of the accident, I threw a 'survival party.’
It was around 8 or 9 15-year-old girls sitting in the living room doing karaoke to Avril Lavigne, joining Omegle to talk to 50-year-old men, and celebrating me not dying a year before. We had a cake and food and lots of laughter and I didn’t see the morbid or tragic in that at all. Those girls were also the ones who had helped me regain whatever sense of normalcy I could’ve so it was also, for me, a celebration of friendship, which is always my favourite kind of celebration to have.
On the tenth year, I realised I was on holiday with my friends. We hadn’t calculated it that way but we split a bottle of wine and sat on a balcony, poking and prodding at our sunburns and laughing over life. All was still and life was good.
On the twentieth year, I’d like to be sat in my garden full of people, hosting a huge meal with vegetables I’ve grown myself. Music will be playing and laughter will fill the gaps in the air, but my thirteenth year is proving to be extremely difficult so far. I do think the reason for this is because my brother’s birthday is in two weeks. He turns 14.
I look at how much of a child he is, playing games on his iPad and asking for permission to go to the park with his friends, giving us cuddles and pulling pranks on us that can only be described as rage fuel. He is a child, he’s living as a child, he has too many legos to count and he’s spent so much pocket money on plushies that they take up his whole bed. He brings home stuff he’s cooked in his food tech class and he tells us about all the drama with his new girlfriend, they meet up to go ice skating. My mother takes him to his music classes and sits outside until he’s done, they get chicken and chips on the way home. He playfights with my dad in the garden seeing who can ‘flip’ who first (he always loses), he argues with my sister about where his switch games have gone (she always has them), and he cares for me in a way a child should not have too, making sure he knows where my emergency hospital bag is and carrying me to the sofa when I have pain fits on the floor and nobody is around but us.
I was 14 once too, but today I just honestly do not remember it. I do not remember what it was like to just be a child. I do not remember what it was like to want to sit and play with my friends. I do remember waking up grown.
This could all be well and depressing, and it is, I’m typing through tears, but 13 years is a long long time to be resilient, to be on the ‘fight’ side of fight or flight, to be not only surviving but also to find myself living, despite it all.
13 years ago I was told I’d never walk again. 13 years ago I could not lift my arms let alone feed myself. 13 years ago I was a child in a hospital bed in a country I did not know surrounded by people I did not know, I was certain my parents and siblings had died and they just weren’t telling me about it. I didn’t find out everyone was in a terrible state but still alive until a full three weeks later. 13 years ago I survived, and I asked myself at what cost but then I looked around me and I understand this is why I survived.
I survived so I could paint stupid little trees, and so I could watch old men performing blues. I survived so I could love more than I will ever hurt, I survived so that I could become so much more than just a survivor story. I lived so that I could surround myself with people all so insanely good I genuinely wonder how I got so lucky.
This anniversary is a tough one and I’d be lying if I said I’m not in pain. My head is pounding, I’ve had no water, and my room is a bomb site. But I live.
I woke up 13 years ago unsure if I was still alive, I looked down at the car and could see myself from an out-of-body view and I was certain I was descending into the heaven I had spent so many years denying existed. But I woke up today alive. I wake up today knowing I am safe. I wake up today able to raise my arms and let the sun in, let it sit on my skin and heal all the parts of me that ache. I wake up today and I am so thankful, and so upset and so confused because fuck I love that I am alive but why did I need such a painful lesson to feel such gratitude?
I woke up changed. I woke up mourning, I am constantly grieving myself and today feels genuinely like a death anniversary but also a rebirth that in itself is so haunting. There is so much warmth that comes with the bad but I miss her so much.
I miss 14-year-old me so much I cannot explain it without sounding crazy, I never got a chance to say goodbye and I hate that. I hate that I never got to say my last words, I hate that I didn’t get to give her one last hug. It’s a goodbye all over again and it hurts. I don’t remember her, I don’t remember what motivated her or what she enjoyed or what she hated, I don’t remember her fears, I don’t remember what she was hoping would be her becoming.
Today is also a birthday. For current me who turns 13. She is incredibly smart, and witty and humble. She is incredibly strong and also incredibly weak at times, she is human. She has so many people who surround her with nothing but love, who show up without any need for words, who care no matter the circumstance, who understand and share the hurt. She laughs - too loud, she tells stories that make people cackle even louder, and she loves as though it is the only thing she truly knows. She takes bad days on head first and she hates to rest even if it’ll kill her. She creates until it consumes, she consumes until it makes her create. She’s beautiful. Truly, scars and all she is beautiful. I love her, I admire her, and she moves on from loss as if it is a reward.
I miss the 14-year-old me, the one I hardly remember now. And I love and also hate seeing what a normal 14-year-old should be like, in my own home, it is complicated and I do understand why it hurts but I am happy to see a 14-year-old untouched by this other side of life.
I am hurting today, but I take this day to thank my body for not quitting on me, time and time again.
I take this day to thank my friends near and far, but especially old, for surviving with me and beside me, time and time again.
I take this day to thank my family, your selflessness has taught me what it means to be a human.
I take this day to thank life, for giving me another shot, and another and another. For allowing me, in all my broken glory, to breathe today, to love today, to cry and hurt and feel today.
I would feel the pain of today a hundred times over if it means I get to live the life I live with the people I love and who love me, as a butterfly effect set off on the 31st of August 2011. I cannot stress this enough. I love you all endlessly. Let’s keep on dancing. Let’s call it a celebration of our own personal little deaths and rebirths every day. Let’s call this the day of rebirth into something wonderful. Something I’m so incredibly lucky to hold.
I’ll keep on crying in bed for a bit today, honour the pain and hurt as I’ve learnt what an insolent child it can become when ignored. But once that’s done I am going to make myself a lovely meal followed by cake. I will blow out the candles and make a wish for both me now and me then. And I hope you’ll all be here to follow along and see if it comes true.
In love and health always,
Strange Glue.