The Winter Project

1. Isabel

She still woke up in the night every so often; bolt upright with nothing in her head except for the faint sounds of gunshots and the sensation of a buzzing in her ears. She could feel warm blood on her forehead and the soft touch of her mother's hand on hers, limp and unresponsive. Every time it happened, she closed her eyes but stayed upright, scared of having to go back to sleep and relive the nightmare again. She stayed that way until she was so tired that she had no choice but to lie back down and let sleep take hold of her.

She remembered vividly the way she felt that morning. She was angry and agitated because of the heat, and she was making her parents suffer with her continuous crying. When she thought about it now, she felt nothing but guilt for being so difficult, even though she had no way of knowing that it would be the last morning she would ever spend with her mother and father. Until she was fifteen years old, Isabel was unsure about what had actually happened that day, until she was able to research the incident for herself. The relentless searching of the incident online allowed her to fill in the blanks in her memory so that she was able to picture it more clearly. Sometimes she was unable to confirm which parts were memory and which parts were figments of her imagination drawn from words printed in news articles.

The three of them were walking through the streets of Milan on a scorching hot summers day in late June. It was their last day of a weeklong holiday, and her mother and father had considered staying in the hotel until it was time to make their way to the airport but Isabel had been restless and demanding, so they had chosen to explore the city centre for one last time in an attempt to burn some of their four-year-old toddler's energy. Isabel felt a twist in her stomach every time she remembered the conversation about taking Isabel into the city for gelato. Whenever she thought about the fact that she had refused to eat it, her eyes filled with tears and a lump formed in her throat that felt like a giant rock, wedged tightly and unable to be swallowed.

As they were walking past the Duomo di Milano, Isabel remembered clearly hearing screams from a crowd in the distance, and her father making a remark about a football game. She remembered seeing people running in her direction, and dropping her gelato on the floor. She remembered screaming about the gelato so intensely and feeling desperately upset that her parents were not comforting her about such a horrifying tragedy. She remembered lying on the floor under her father's weight, wondering why he would not respond to her cries, and she remembered hearing gunshots, feeling the blood on her forehead and her mother's cold touch.

She remembered nothing after that, except for her grandmother being in the hotel in Milan, the Polizia talking to her in an aggressive tone of voice, the flight home with Grandma. The funeral, she does not remember at all, but she does remember everybody being nice to her and buying her lots of toys, which she stored in Grandma's spare room where she slept every night until she was nineteen years old.

Isabel loved her Grandma more than anything in the world. They would stay up late together talking about everything; her mother and father, the universe, religion, Isabel's plans for the future, her grandmother's travels. Her grandmother had travelled all over the world with Isabel's grandfather when they were in their twenties, and she had so many wonderful stories that gave Isabel an idea of what her grandfather was like before he had died when she was too young to remember.

Isabel was eighteen when her grandmother died. She took her grandmother's death harder than the death of her parents as she did not need to rely on news articles to remember the day it had happened.

She tried to bury her head in the sand for so long about her grandmother's diagnosis and for a long time it worked. Her grandmother would say 'oh, everything is fine!' or 'it's just part of the process' and Isabel would accept it because that was what she wanted to hear. She knew, as she became more involved in caregiving throughout her grandmother's decline, that she could not bury her head in the sand forever, and what started as a minor infection turned into a hospital stay. Isabel was too young for the responsibility, she thought, as she spoke with doctors and nurses about the treatment options. She remembers vaguely the conversations about antibiotics not working, about ending treatment, about days remaining. She remembers seeing her grandmother's face instantly look ten years younger as she finally let go, leaving Isabel behind as she went on to wherever it is people go when they die. She didn't cry for days, and when she finally started to cry she could not stop.

To Isabel, grief felt like a giant bag of bricks was hitting her in the chest, making it hard for her to breathe. She would cry so hard that it physically hurt until she couldn't cry anymore. Then, she would feel normal. She would go about her day, buying food and cleaning the house. She would feel empty for hours, even days. Then, out of nowhere, the bag of bricks would come back out of nowhere and hit her again, making her feel winded. She would feel in the pit of her stomach the same feeling you get when you suddenly remember something crucially important that you forgot to do; as if somebody was twisting her insides. Before she knew it, she would feel normal again. This cycle would continue every day, each phase lasting varying amounts of time. She dreaded the feeling of being winded again, and so she threw herself into her grief, facing it head on as much as she could stand to.

She remembers her grandmothers funeral like it was yesterday, but mostly she remembers going home that night and sitting on the sofa, looking over at her grandmother's armchair and wishing for nothing more in the world than the ability to sit up and talk to her about her travels until the early hours of the morning. She felt that she hadn't listened enough; that there were stories she would now never be able to learn, memories that had died alongside her grandmother in the hospital bed.

She stayed in her grandmother's house that year, unable to build up the courage to move anywhere else without the loving support of her grandmother and a home to come back to when she was homesick or lonely. For the first six months, she lay around the house in her grandmother's clothes, smoking her cigarettes to form a nostalgic smell in the air, sifting through photo albums and surviving on minimal food. She spent Christmas day alone, aimlessly flicking through TV channels and forgetting to eat.

By the time spring came around, Isabel forced herself to find a job in an office that paid enough for her to move out of her grandmother's house and pay rent in a house share not far from where she worked. Her grandmother's house, which was now in Isabel's name, was only a forty-minute walk from her new flat, but she never visited it again.