Beginning & The End…

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the end and the beginning… of everything… all at once.

Twenty years since this… and everything after has been a gift and a curse. A life lived a lifetime ago and now only tenuous strings hold me to what was before… Tenuous ties and strings I’ve tried vehemently to cut and yet cling desperately to — As if they will somehow save me from what I’ve become or take me back to what I was before…

For years following I had flashbacks, anxiety, night terrors… the smell of burning rubber or oil… The feel of snowflakes on my face… a curve on a hill… an overcast day on a country backroad… the hypnic jerk on the edge between awake and asleep that would continually throw me back into that car, that day, in the snow…impact. The pieces of a memory I can’t quite grasp and yet can’t forget.

There are more days than not when I feel like I’m living on borrowed time. There are sometimes moments when I wonder if I died that day and this is all my heaven or hell… There are times when I still get so angry… So scared… So tired…

There are days I want to just scream at someone, at anyone — I need them to realize that I haven’t felt ANY real pain since that day. That parts of me – mentally, physically, spiritually – haven’t felt ANYTHING since that day. I want them to recognize that an 18-year-old girl died that cold winter’s day… and the person who stands before you, blackened by the fire that she was FORCED to step into, can never go back. She can never unknow or unfeel any of this… She just tries to forget.

But I never want to forget…
Because what if that moment is all there was that was ever real… The last moments of a life long since gone. That very moment when I knew it was all over and there was no going back… The moment when they pushed back the cinders and found the rebirthed me, swaddled in my twisted metal blanket of blood and chrome, broken and shattered beneath a million shards of broken glass…

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