5. Little one
Two
AURELIA
Someone once told me no child truly has a happy childhood. Everyone carries some kind of trauma. Some bring it from home. Others find it waiting outside.
Pain moves in circles like that. Parents pass it to children; children pass it to someone else, and one day you wake up realizing it never stops. Trauma just keeps coming back. Sometimes it feels like drowning all over again.
I’m one of the kids who had a good home and good parents. If I died, people would say I grew up in a loving family. That I had a happy childhood. Looking back now, I was far from happy. When you’re different in a world that expects everyone to fit neatly into the same shape, it hurts. My differences confusedpeople. They didn’t pause long enough to understand it, and they just decided it was wrong and punished me for it.
Luckily for me, Dasha taught me how to punch back. And every time I tried to give up, she refused to let me.
I have been staring at the wall for a long time. The thought of my parents, of Daniel, rises in my throat like a heavy stone, and it presses there, begging to break free. All I want to do is scream, but nothing comes out.
My chest hurts, yet at the same time everything inside me feels numb, like none of this is real, like any second the door will open and they will walk in and tell me this was all a mistake.
I close my eyes for a moment.
A different universe slips into my mind, the one where my parents are still alive.
When I open my eyes again, Dasha is standing in the doorway, watching me. I guess in this universe the only person truly here is Dasha.
The truth is, my parents were already gone long before the accident. They were not dead, but distant. We were living separate lives, orbiting far from one another. But now, knowing I will never see their faces again brings pain to my chest.
Thoughts of Daniel are different. As much as I loved him, something else sits beneath the grief. Relief. My heart breaks knowing I will never see him again. But for the first time in five years, I feel freedom.
From the corner of my eye, I see Dasha move toward me. I keep staring ahead until she is standing right in front of me.
“What’s on your mind?” she asks, sitting beside the bed. My gaze settles on the black notebook clutched to her chest.
“People,” I say, my eyes meeting hers now.
My throat is dry. I swallow, forcing the words past it. They come out raspy. “Mom and Dad.” I let out a slow breath. “Daniel, too.”
She stays quiet, and the only sounds in the room are the machines beeping beside me and a clock ticking somewhere behind us.
“Do you miss them?”
“I don’t know.” A tear slips down my cheek. “Does that make me a horrible person?”
She presses her thin lips together and studies me for a moment.
“When my mother died, I didn’t cry for a year,” she says softly. “Not once.”
Her gaze drifts somewhere past me.
“Tears came one night when I wanted to tell her something I did that day. Something funny. I reached for my phone before it hit me that she wasn’t here anymore.”
“I cried the whole night.” She exhales slowly. “And somehow it felt like I cried for the entire year all at once.”
“Grief moves in different ways. No matter how strong you are, there will always be little things about the person you lost. Things that make you smile, things that break you all over again.”
“I wanted to tell Daniel I wasn’t ready to get married that night,” I say, lowering my eyes to my hands.
My left thumb hovers near my right one. I drag my nail slowly down the skin until it burns red.
“I’m not sure if it was something his mother said, or maybe mine. Something about it made me realize I wasn’t ready.” My fingers start to tremble. “I wanted to finish my masters and go abroad. Play piano somewhere in Paris.”
