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I've always thought memories were a funny thing. The good ones are always so hazy when we try to remember them, it's like looking through frosted glass trying to recall the sounds and feelings you felt in those moments. Then there's the bad ones.
The memories you so desperately wish to forget are always so much clearer. Bright and shining in the sea of fog that makes up all the memories of my life. Haunting you at every available chance.
I wish I could choose to forget them, steal their light and instead gift it to a memory I actually want to hold onto. Unfortunately we don't get to pick and choose what our mind thinks is important.
My worst memory, and the one I can never seem to forget, was when I was eleven years old. It was a single moment that changed my life forever. I remember the day like it happened yesterday. It was July 1999 and the weather was abnormally hot for Washington, I was sweating, bad.
My mom and I had opted for spending the day in LaPush with Sarah and Billy Black and their kids. Mom was best friends with Sarah and Billy so, as it goes, Jacob, Rachel, Rebecca, and I were raised like siblings.
Rachel and Rebecca wanted ice cream, they begged me to ask the moms, so I did. I pleaded with Sarah and mom, trying all sorts of tactics to convince them that the ice cream shop in Forks had the best ice cream there was and I'd do anything if they just took me to get some for everyone.
It didn't take long for them to cave. And within moments we were out the door.
Sarah, mom, and I never made it to the ice cream shop.
Sarah didn't make it onto the ambulance.
And mom.... mom didn't make it out of the OR.
I spent a week in the ICU, my injuries so severe that they didn't think I'd even survive the first night. I broke my left leg, my left arm, my right wrist, multiple ribs were splintered, and my neck was fractured.
But, as fortunate as I am to survive, something had to give, some sort of punishment for what happened. So, I woke up two weeks later with nightmares of the accident, nightmares that flooded my head for years afterwards. The sound of mom screaming for me and Sarah to wake up, the sound of Sarah gasping for air that would never make it to her lungs, the blood...
I remember how confused I was, waking up to Billy next to my bed, his hand holding my unbroken arm. Tears were in his eyes and when I opened my eyes I could see him whispering a prayer of thanks before placing a tearful kiss on my head.
My heart broke in two as he told me that mom and Sarah weren't coming home. The two most important women in my life, and I lost them in the same day. We all lost them.
Once I was awake, the question came about who's care I'd be placed in. My dad died when I was three and I had no living relatives. Billy didn't even hesitate when he told the social worker that he'd take me in, raise me as his own.
It was the worst day of my life, and if it weren't for Billy, who knows where I'd be today.
