She wanted to be a sports superstar. Now she's just sitting in a wheelchair having no feelings or control over almost all her body below the shoulders, except some muscles on her arms.
She wanted to be a sports superstar. But someone cut short that dream. Who's responsible? She wasn't thinking about the culprit. She was just silently crying inside so she didn't seem to be crying outside as she looked at the mirror and saw her dreams evaporate again and again.
The coach ordered her to dive in the shallow end of the pool. Why? Was he drunk? Was he mad? Was he stupid? Was he just negligent? She did it. Did she realize what she was doing? No. She was drunk? No. She was just not paying attention. She couldn't remember now.
And her neck broke at the bottom of the pool. She remembered watching "The Sea Inside", a Spanish movie about a real quadriplegic who decided to die. She was only 15. She didn't want to die, and she could move a bit of her arms, and her neck. So she broke her neck for reasons only God knew, and since then she had been on this wheelchair. What's worse is that she had been dependent on all these people helping her, pitying her, avoiding her.
Ah yes, the avoiding part. Being dependent on people with everything, simple things like getting out of bed, was already bad enough, but to be avoided is worse. After she left the hospital, she learned that the school had given her a thousand dollars to shut her up, and then all her friends stopped calling her or returning her calls. One day one of her closest friends came to return two books and a cricket set to her. She didn't stay and didn't make eye contacts. She said her mother was in the car waiting. But before she left, she turned around to our would've-been-sports-star and said, "I am really sorry I stopped talking to you. My Mother told me that being with you would upset me, would interfere with my life, my studies.... I am so sorry to see you like this. But feeling so sorry makes me realize my Mother is right. I hope you do well, maybe one day...." She couldn't bear it any longer, turned around and left.
Suddenly she has no friends, or maybe she never did have real ones. She felt the loneliness much sharper and more enduring as pain than when she hit her head at the bottom of the pool that afternoon a year ago.
Trying to hold back the tears. It's so difficult.
Even her own family is avoiding her more and more. Relatives rarely visit and never look at her, talking to her indirectly. She could hear the grumbling her father made sometimes, about how unfair the world is that he couldn't just sue the school for more. And the mother is crying almost daily, right when she looked at her the first time of the day. Looking at the mirror, our little heroine sees a burden, a burden that does nothing but sit around.
