Dream or Reality?
Nine years. A stretch of time that should feel concrete, but it does not. It hovers at the edge of memory, faint and incomplete, like smoke drifting from a fire that burned itself out long ago. Sometimes it feels like it belonged to someone else. Not me. A life I am only partly allowed to remember.
I’ve begun writing again. Though if I am honest, I never truly stopped. The words have always lived inside me, alive beneath the surface, dense with color, aching with memory. Even when I was a snaggletoothed girl in thick glasses and a home-perm gone wrong, long-limbed and fragile, towering over my peers like a sapling unsure of its place in the forest. I was writing then, too, my private opus, my unfinished love letter to the world, long before I understood what I longed to say.
Moving to Wheaton in grade school offered a chance to become someone new. A new town. A new skin. I arrived like a quiet moth, determined not to shine. I would not be the teacher’s pet, not the precocious “smart one.” I would dissolve into the background, just another kid tracing her name on the cover of a Trapper Keeper, practicing sameness like survival.
And for a while, it worked.
Until middle school, when the seams of my camouflage began to fray. Life in those years felt like a film reel unspooling—scenes stitched together with the buzz of classrooms, the slap of hurried feet on cracked sidewalks. I’d ride my bike to Northside Park and sit by the pond, sketching reflections—of water, of trees, of the quiet pause between thoughts. Sometimes I’d meet my brother at the tennis courts beside the bandshell, the two of us flushed with sun and laughter, our volleys more ritual than rivalry. I often ended up at the library, inhaling books, slipping back into my own skin just in time to beat my parents home.
Our summers were unscripted magic. Babysitters—sometimes young, sometimes old, always half-interested—left us to wander the edges of the world. Behind garages and beneath the shadows of forgotten carriage houses, my brother and I built entire universes out of dirt and daring. My friendships were few, but honest. Mostly, I preferred the company of characters, ones I conjured, ones whose scripts I memorized, black-and-white movie heroines and dog-eared protagonists who always knew just what to say.
I found sanctuaries for my wildness: art contests, writing competitions, music, theater. At home, there was joy. Music echoing from every corner. The scent of celebration folded into the carpet. Family swirled around in chaotic love—laughing, singing, arguing, forgiving. We camped in autumn and built blazing fires. We escaped to Florida once the thaw began. And in Indiana, barefoot in the grass, I listened to my grandparents offer the kind of wisdom you can only hear when the television is off and the air holds still.
It is easy to write only of the wounds. And yes, I have begun writing those. I have barely scratched the surface, truthfully. But before the ache, there was architecture. There was love. There was light. A foundation poured with care, built by people who believed in joy and made a ritual of gathering around it. Would I still be here—writing this—if not for that first shelter of belonging? I wonder.
Nine years later, that foundation carried me through something I could never have imagined. I recently stumbled upon digital medical files from my ICU hospitalization. I opened them with hesitation. I read with caution. The words were clinical, precise, flat, but their weight hit me all the same. Fragmented. Disorienting. Each entry a shard of a life I lived but cannot fully touch. At first, I was frozen, overwhelmed by the rawness of it, unsure how to process the details that had once been just echoes in my mind. I have not yet had the courage to go back and follow every line. For now, I let them sit, fluttering in the margins of consciousness.
I remember waking. Slowly. Reluctantly. Confused. My eyelids heavy, sealed by darkness. They opened. And there were those eyes, wide and filled with awe and terror. Mirrors of the abyss I had been climbing out of. Then the voice. Sharp, relieved, disbelief and fear all at once. “Oh my God! You woke up! We thought we were going to lose you.”
It reached across the void. Pulled me back. I was adrift. Suspended in a body that felt foreign, unrecognizable. Words would not come. Mouth dry. Lungs filled with sand. Trapped beneath wires and tubes. Machines hummed, beeped, dictated my breath, my pulse, my existence. Flesh and bone and metal. Alive, but not living.
The world fractured. White coats. Green scrubs. Blurred figures moving frantically. Voices clashing against walls. Hands and needles moving too fast to follow. A language I did not know, yet urgency I understood. Eyes flicked between monitors, charts, IV lines. A needle sank in, sharp as a snakebite. Pain burned through me, quick, merciless.
And then. Everything shattered. Voices faded. Lights dimmed. Fear dissolved. Nothing. Silence. Overwhelming. Almost peaceful.
And yet, I remember. Memory is not a single thread. It moves like water, rising and falling, flitting in fragments. A smell. A sound. A glance. Sometimes the white walls of the ICU. Sometimes the low, constant hum of machines, punctuated by beeps that marked life and death. Sometimes the weight of hands and voices pressing against the fragile skin of my consciousness.
Even now, fragments linger. My body remembers what my mind only half recalls. The fear. The surrender. The strange calm that came with the recognition that everything had shifted and nothing could be taken for granted again. I am tethered to that place, that time, yet I am here. Alive. Writing. Remembering. Piecing together fragments. Naming them. Breathing through them.
And in the stillness of reflection, I see the strange gift of it all. The way it shaped me. The way it reminded me what it means to hold on. The way it showed me that even when the body feels alien, even when the world fractures, even when memory falters, there is still a self to return to. A self that endures. That witnesses. That survives.
I carry that girl with me still. The one who wandered through sunlit libraries, who filled notebooks with invented lives, who chose story over small talk. She never left. She is still watching, wide-eyed and tender, holding the kind of hope only children possess. And finally, I am listening.
I have not left it behind. Not fully. Not entirely. But I am here. Moving forward. Carrying it with me. Letting it settle in quiet corners of my mind. And sometimes, just sometimes, I feel the pulse of that time beneath my skin, a reminder that I am still whole, still alive, still remembering.
