“Everything happens for a reason” my mom replied, not looking up from her morning paper.

“Mom, you heard what the doctor said, it was all luck. If anything else would have been different, even by just a few seconds, I would be dead” I responded, still not locking eyes with the demon across the room.

“Believe what you want to believe, honey. God has chosen path for each of us. And this was your chosen path—your fate brought you here to this point. Now you know to be more careful when you’re driving. Well, I suppose not driving anymore, but in life we need to make choices and now hopefully you have learned from your mistakes enough not to make the same ones again.”

Silence is sometimes worth more than words would ever be able to express. I stared at the human sitting at the table, drinking coffee slowly, and wondered how it was possible to be related to someone so radically different from myself. I just wanted to scream at her. Yell. It was disgusting that she actually believed this is what my life was meant to turn into. I suppressed every urge I had to scream, to let her know how much I disagreed with every word which spilled out of her unfiltered mouth.

Diseases spread through a community. Children are born into homes upon which they have no chance of survival. People live each day on the cold streets of the city. Women walk ten miles a day just to gather unsanitary water for their families. Abuse occurs from parent to child, husband to wife. Murder. Death. Rape. Yes, all of these horrible tragedies faced by millions of suffering individuals around the world occur, by “fate”.

I wanted to scream this at her. But I doubt that her close-minded brain would even begin to comprehend what I am trying to tell her—that SOMETIMES LIFE JUST IS NOT FAIR. As much as I wanted to leave this horrible house the second I turned eighteen in two weeks, I was stuck. Paralyzed from the waist down physically, but the biggest hit went to my mind.

“It’s a wonder she’s still alive,” the doctor had exclaimed. “I have never seen someone in this bad of a crash make it out without any damage to the head—with medical assistance she will be able to live a relatively normal life.”

Normal. Ha. So now normal includes waking up, shrieking in the middle of the night from the cycling visuals of a truck tumbling through the front windshield. Shaking, I would crave to turn on the light next to my bed. But the light is always too far away for me to reach and I am yet again stuck. Stuck I am for the rest of my life, always needing someone around me for assistance. Like an infant, I must be carefully attended to. But like the doctor said—this is “normal” right?

All it took were a few seconds, a few small irreversible seconds to completely alter the course of my life. What if I would have taken a different way home that night? What if we would have left a couple minutes later? What if the truck had left minutes earlier? These questions now drive me to insanity when I think about where I am.

So even though I wanted to desperately tell my mom all of these thoughts which clouded my head, I could not anymore. After a long silence I decided to break it.

Putting on a fake smile, I asked my mom politely “could you wheel me to the bathroom.”
The time it took her to respond was the same amount of time it took for the brown Toyota to charge into my world. Because although a few seconds may appear to be nothing, in this amount of time, a life can be steered into a whole different direction.