It was difficult to see someone as strong as Thiago going through something like that, and he didn’t want me to witness it.
He hardly spoke to me. He said he couldn’t find the words, but the nurses told me he was getting better all the time. He would tense up when I visited him. I realized he was uncomfortable whenever I was around. But why? Why would he feel that way?
“Go back to Harvard,” he told me during one of his physical therapy sessions. He was so weak that he could hardly stand and take a few steps.
“But I want to be here. I want to help you—”
“I don’t!” he shouted, and everyone in the physical therapy room turned and looked at us. “It’s killing me, letting you see me like this— I can’t. I can’t have you close right now. I need you to go.”
He was shaking, so the doctors rushed in to assist him. Finally, his mother told me to go.
“Give him time, Kami,” she told me in the hospital cafeteria. “He doesn’t feel like himself; his body and his brain are betraying him, and he doesn’t want you to see him in this state. I know my son, and the same way I knew you would bring him back, I know that right now, you being here is only going to slow down his recovery.”
It was hard to accept, and I resisted it at first, but it was true that whenever he saw me, he got worse. As soon as I walked into the room, he’d turn angry and tell me to leave.
I cried all night, and then in the morning, I tried to force a smile.
What was happening? Was I going to lose him all over again? After all the time I waited for him to come back to me?
I didn’t know, so I decided to return to Harvard.
The day before I went back to school, I visited him in his room.
“I’ll wait for you,” I told him. He looked better, a little more like himself even though he was still so thin. They’d given him a shave and styled his hair like before, but he was far from that athletic guy he’d been. His vitality was missing.
He was staring out the window, looking irritated. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get why it was so hard to look at me.
“I was with my sister,” he confessed finally, and it was the first time in days he’d said something to me that wasn’t a complaint or dismissal.
I froze. “What… What do you mean by your sister?”
“I mean the only sister I have, the one I lost. I was with her, I could see her, I could hug her, I could run around with her and play hide-and-seek. We talked, and that pain tucked so deep inside of me—I felt it disappear.”
I stood there waiting for him to continue, not knowing what to say, because we both knew his sister was dead. If he had been with her, did that mean Thiago had been dead, too?
“You brought me back, and I’m thankful, but sometimes… sometimes I wonder if that was what was supposed to happen. Is this really the place for me after everything that happened?”
“Your place is wherever I am, isn’t it?” I asked, trying with all my strength not to burst into tears.
His green eyes looked straight into mine.
“I don’t even know if I’ll fully recover. I don’t know if I’ll be able to walk like before, or run, or play basketball. I don’t know if my body will ever be the same. And you deserve better.”
“I deserve to be with you,” I said.
“No! You deserve to be with someone who won’t be a burden to you. You deserve someone healthy, strong, mentally capable, someone who can give you everything you deserve. And me—”
“You’re going to get better.”
“I need you to go, Kamila,” he said, and when he called me by my full name, I always knew he was serious. “Don’t make me repeat it. I won’t let you throw your life away because of me.”
I was furious. Didn’t he realize how much I had suffered? Was he aware of the mental and emotional effort I had made coming to see him every day, drawing strength from places I didn’t know I had to will a miracle to occur? And this was how he thanked me?
I stood. “I think I deserve a lot more than this,” I responded, holding back my tears. “Do you have any idea how much—”
“I didn’t ask you to,” he cut me off again. “I’m grateful for your efforts, for your hope and commitment. I know you were determined to wake me up, but I can’t just pick up where we left off. I can’t look you in the face knowing I don’t deserve you. So please, just go, start your life over, because I have a long road ahead of me, and I have to walk that road alone.”
Alone?
I left feeling rejected and wounded—my whole body was heavy with pain.
I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t let me be there for him.
But I gave him his space.
I went back to college and left behind the depressive Kami, the weak Kami, the Kami who stayed in her room reading stories of people who had awakened from comas and learning about the aftereffects of brain trauma.
I became myself again, left the pain behind, hard as it was—and it was the hardest thing I’d ever done—but I couldn’t go on sacrificing my life for others.
I had done my job; I had fought for him, for us. If he didn’t want to see it that way, and this was how he thanked me, then maybe, maybe I had been wrong.
