Till We Ain't Strangers Anymore

CHAPTER THREE - Unwritten

Faber est suae quisque fortunae.

Every man (and woman) is the the artisan of their own fortune. Now, she has no idea where she had learned Latin, but she firmly believed this phrase. That every person is the architect of their own fate.

I am a blank page of an unwritten story. I am the I am the artist of my own masterpiece. A blank canvas waiting to be painted. A clean slate. I can be whatever, whoever I want to be.

Waking up from a coma and finding out that you've lost every part of your past doesn't have to wreck you as a person. You can either remain stuck in a past the doesn't exist to you, or you can choose to move on with whatever that is left of your life. She chose the latter. To continue living without knowing who she was and where she came from was challenging and scary as hell. It was a good thing that she didn't have to do it all alone.

She was glad that she has Jackson Crow in her life. Jack is her best friend for only a couple of years, but feels like they've known each other from a whole 'nother lifetime. He was in the same ferry accident as she was a couple of years ago. They were both found floating in New York Harbor, unconscious, practically lifeless. No ID's, no memory, no family to claim them. They weren't in the registry of ferry passengers. Or in any other registry, for that matter. They found out later that they were in a coma for the same amount of time, and woke up at exactly the same time. They even went to the same support group for patients suffering psychogenic amnesia.

It didn't take long for them to become each other's family. They always felt the need to protect each other, and be each other's biggest fan. Jack was even the one who gave her the name, 'Jillian Nigthingale', because their names had to match, and he said that she sounded like a nightingale. She was more than fine with it. It was a move up from 'Jane Doe', the name given to her at the hospital after the incident.

She relished on playing the role of Jackson's BFF and little sister. She was also his constant defender against those who took advantage of him. The man had a big heart, and he is too damn nice for his own good. But between the two of them, Jack was the responsible and successful one. He was the one who worried about everything and everyone else. Maybe that was the reason why he has his heart condition. He has a tendency of taking everything way too seriously.

Not like she doesn't have her fair share of health problems. Not long after waking up from her coma, she was diagnosed with intracranial aneurysms. Multiple tiny blood balloons that scattered inside her skull. Doctors said it was inoperable...first opinion, second opinion, third opinion...they had all said the same thing. That they can manage it with the right drugs, but surgery was out of the question if she wanted to keep the full use of her eyes, since the some of the aneurysms were located dangerously close to her optic nerves. Not to mention that there's a high risk of her dying in the operating table. There's also a huge risk of her dying once the blood balloons burst. It's one of those 'Damned if you...Damned if you don't' dilemmas. Each options present a negative outcome for her. She's a woman without a past, and apparently living on borrowed time. But that doesn't mean that she can't have a future, for however short it might be. Because if she was indeed doomed, she only had two options in spending the remainder of her short life. She can either spend the time she has left dying, or living. She preferred to live...to live her life in her own terms, for however long it may be.

And lived, she did. She drank. She smoke. She partied. She broke hearts. She had her heart broken. She lived. She loved. She rocked the shit out of her life. And most of all, she dreamed. She dreamed until dreaming wasn't enough, she had to make it a reality. And in a move that can be deemed as a big middle finger salute to those who thought she should just curl up in a corner and die, she took a page out of Jack's book, and worked hard on making her dreams come true.