Dies Et Noctis

Part 1

(Part 1)

My name is Lucida Lambert. I am sixteen this year, and in one months' time, I am going to turn seventeen. I have a soft brown hair that I keep close to my shoulders, and I am proud of the silkiness that I have nursed it to.

My life is not normal, but not spectacular. Instead, I wish every day that I can be normal again, like all the other girls out there in school. But I can't. At least not anymore.

Two years ago, when I was walking across the road on my way home from the library, a drunken driver lost control of the car and couldn't pull the brakes in time. I was wedged under the car for a whole fifteen minutes until the car was lifted from me, and by then my legs could not be saved. In the two years of recuperation, I have recovered well from the shock, but sadness is still there. I can no longer stand, I no longer have any legs.

The fact that I was never an active girl from the start did well to buffer my pain of losing my legs. I was always a bookworm, and whenever I did need the use of my legs, it was only to cart me to and from the library. But now, without the use of legs, every little thing became of difficulty to me.

Getting to the washroom became a chore, going to get some snacks was something I had to reconsider a few more times than normal teenagers. My aunt and uncle did their best to comfort me, and for them, I always told them that I was fine.

I am an orphan. My parents died in a car crash when I was two, and I was sent to my aunt and uncle. But it is fine; I love them like my own parents. My aunt and uncle have cared for me right from the start, and treated me like the daughter that they never had. We were a happy family, and for them, I always smiled –even without legs.

It is the school holidays, and both my aunt and uncle are at work, so I'm alone at home, staring at the same four walls of my past 16 –going on 17 –years. I've run out of things to do. When I was involved in the accident, I had been given pardon for not attending my examinations. Still, I had done my best to catch up with the rest of the class, and there was nothing else for me to do. Reading storybooks was slowly becoming boring, and watching TV dramas had also lost its beauty.

I wheeled myself to the back of the house, looking out to the backyard which led into the deep forest. We live in a normal suburban house, but we are closer to the city center than the other houses, so my aunt and uncle can afford travelling every day for their jobs.

It took me a quick moment to decide what to do for the day. Wheeling back to the storage, I dug through the mess to find my outdoor wheelchair –the one meant for rough terrains. Getting myself from one wheelchair to another used to take so much strength, but two years was enough to make me get used to everything. I wrote a letter and left it in the kitchen for my aunt just in case I came home late, grabbed a bag, found lunch in the refrigerator, a bottle of water, my phone and a flashlight.

And then I was off.

When I was younger, the forest seemed so scary and dark. On Halloween, Uncle would appear from the forest with a black cape, and I would convinced that a real-life vampire was here to suck my blood. When I grew older and become more interested in my nature surrounding, Uncle brought me hiking through the forest. With Uncle around, I was never afraid of getting lost. But now that I was going in there alone to make my own adventure, I made sure I saw exactly where I was going, marking my route to make sure I could turn back whenever I wanted to.

Wheeling over uneven ground was hard work that had me in crazy sweat, but all of it paid off when I returned to my favorite clearing that I used to visit easily when I still had my legs. I remembered coming out here for a few days with my tent, pretending to be 'camping', when Uncle would bring me food and water during mealtimes.