Intertwined Destinies

Trigger: Suicide, violence

I wake up on a hard bed, a bright fluorescent light blinding me for a second. As I try to blink the spots out of my vision, I notice that there are many people in the room. And all of them are looking at me.

I ignore them and try to sit up.

I immediately regret it.

A sharp pain runs up my arm and my head feels like it’s about to split.

I check my hand, finding an IV attached a vein, dripping liquid into my body.

Those people are still looking at me.

I recognize my parents standing there, looking concerned, and almost…angry at me. A few doctors and nurses surround me, checking my vitals, but I can’t tear my eyes away from my family.

They don’t seem happy.

Before I can open my mouth and ask them why, before I can test whether I can still speak, I hear some sounds coming from outside.

Footsteps approach, and whoever is trying to come in is not being allowed to.

However, they manage to smash past the people outside and enter the room.

A girl stands at the door, with a crazed look in her eyes.

In her hand is a knife.

As she comes towards me, arm raised, ready to plunge it through my body, she is stopped by doctors and nurses, and the knife is knocked out of her hand, as it hits the floor with a loud ominous clang.

She screams, loud enough to split my head further, and that is enough to knock me out again.

As I slip out of consciousness, her scream still cuts through the darkness, like the knife she was holding.

******

I wake up again and see that the girl is still fighting the doctors who are trying to restrain her.

I must have passed out for only a few minutes.

Our eyes meet.

She screams again and tries to resist further.

By this time, security guards arrive and pick her up as if she weighs nothing, holding her by the arms tightly as she flails around in vain.

Who is she?

And why did she just try to kill me?

******

“Do you remember your name?”

I wrack my brain for a name, any name to satisfy the doctor who looks at me with a fake understanding smile on his face.

Only one name comes to mind.

“Graciella.”

The smile is immediately wiped off his face, as I notice beads of sweat inch down his forehead.

I feel like I’ve said something wrong, something I shouldn’t have said.

He notes something down, shaking his head in disappointment.

I crane my neck, trying to see what he wrote, but he gets up.

“I’ll be sending in your parents. They’ve been waiting to talk to you for a while,” he says and leaves the room.

I feel like I’m going to get a lecture from them.

I don’t know what I did though.

They enter the room, and as they hug me and ask me how I’m feeling, I weakly smile at them, glad that even though I didn’t remember much of anything else, I remembered them.

They call me Shannon, so I assume that my name is Shannon, not Graciella.

Then who is Graciella?

I open my mouth to ask just that when my head suddenly starts to hurt.

Flashes of events flit through my mind.

A stormy night.

A bridge.

A scream, a loud one.

“Shannon! Shannon!”

I’m woken by my parents, who look at me with great concern.

I wave off the questions and tell them that I’m feeling tired.

Now I know.

I shouldn’t ask about my past.

Because my past wasn’t that great.

And thinking about it only gives me a headache.

Maybe it’s a good thing that I can’t remember.

Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.

******

I’m woken up abruptly.

As I try to figure out what woke me up, I hear a commotion going on outside my hospital room.

A scream rings through the air.

Oh no.

It’s that girl again.

The one who tried to kill me.

Was what I did to get here so terrible that someone was out to take my life?

Almost as if answering my question, she enters my room.

“You will pay for what you did to my sister, you will die just like Graciella,” she yells, and my headache increases, signalling that her words have something to do with a memory from my past.

Exactly like yesterday, she takes the same knife and tries to plunge it into my chest.

I close my eyes in anticipation, almost accepting my fate.

But again, she is stopped.

Maybe they should just let her do it.

That would save me a lot of trouble.

For one, it would stop my parents from looking at me the way they were when I woke up.

It would stop the doctor from being disappointed in me.

My headaches would stop.

Maybe I should just do it myself.

******

It had been a dark and stormy night.

There had been a bridge.

Shannon had been at the edge, and at the last moment, had decided not to jump.

However, she couldn’t stop another girl from jumping.

Graciella.

She was a picture of beauty, as she fell into the water gracefully, her hair framing her smiling serene face, her eyes closed.

Shannon had screamed until her throat was sore, but she was alone.

As she ran back to her house, shaking from the cold and from seeing her jump, she met her sister.

As she confessed to what she had seen, overcome by grief and anger, her sister had hit her until she fell unconscious.

She wasn’t dead though.

But she should have died.

That would have saved her from the pain of her past, a past which she chose not to recall.

She doesn’t know what happened.

She does know, however, that she caused a terrible thing to happen.

And even though it wasn’t her fault, she knows that it would haunt her.

So maybe it’s best if she loses that memory forever.

That memory of a stormy night, on top of a bridge, where she had been helpless.

Where she had become a mere observer to a person who had given up on life.

If she remembered, she would own up to it.

It would eat at her until she forgot how to live her own life.

Even though it wasn’t her fault.

Two people made two decisions that night, how could she possibly have known that their destinies would intertwine?

******