Back for the Battle

So here I am. Back again, but this time I almost didn’t make it. You see, I was ready to take my life’s next challenge head on. My post-graduate adult life. A handful of days later it happened again. Another turn, another twist in the road.

I was just getting used to it. The life I had worked so incredibly hard to earn for myself. Finally having the time to, I don’t know, live a little. I was making a home for myself, setting roots in the place I called my own. Then one night everything, at least most of everything, changed.

I awoke somehow knowing. Memories that seemed to grow more faint with each day that went by. Never in my life had I felt that pain before. Never a broken bone. Never more than a scrape on the knee. Now I feel it. Now there’s pain every day, and it’s all different. That gentle reminder, a constant tension in my back. In a way I’m glad I can feel it. I’m glad I can feel anything. Pieces of me. Parts of me. I feel nothing. In others I feel everything.

You never know where life brings you. One night you decide to be who you are, live a little, and in the next moment you’re waking up in the ICU, where you’ll spend weeks unable to do most of what you had so easily done before. There were small victories and setbacks, and then one day all those doctors said I was okay.

Feelings. Emotions. There are so many of them, and so many different kinds. I did feel okay, considering it all. Considering the fractured, split, lacerated, and broken pieces of what it takes to survive, I did. It doesn’t make sense that I’m here after all of that. But I fought back. I found somehow, some way to get through.

There are still times when it doesn’t seem quite real. As if one day I’ll wake up, having been somewhere in between a dream and reality, and I’ll be walking and running and moving again just fine. But then that argument isn’t so convincing.

Beyond the impact, there’s no explanation. I don’t know, nor does anyone else, why this happened to me, but the one thing I’m not going to do is waste time trying to find a reason. What’s ahead is always unknown, and even more so now than before. No one can tell me what lies ahead, so I just have to keep battling back. Fighting for my life back.

It’s a different life I’ll be living as a paraplegic, but that’s alright. I can do it, and I'll live it all through this page. I’ve always been up for a challenge. Me, A Blonde Battling Back.