Beep. Beep. Beep. The heart monitor beeped quietly through the phone. His heart beat so soft and steady, like a soft beat to a song. I sat on the phone while he told me what happened just hours before the first surgery. All that was running through my mind was him. Is he okay? What will happen if I lost him? Where would I be without him?
On that warm, July summer day a feeling hit me. So hard that it kinda scared me, but at the same time the feeling made me feel alive. The day I fell for him. The small, cute good morning and goodnight text messages, his laugh, and even the way he yawned when he was tired. I never wanted to lose that.
Now and days we see people so focused on their future or what they did in the past. Nick and I both are one of those people. We kept hold on every little thing we have done or has happened to us in the past. We never really stopped and focused on what was going on around us, never living our lives in the moment.
I’ve never been more scared in my life than I was in that moment. As he explained the way they attacked him, the way he tried to fight back. But there was too many of them. They beat him, kicked him, made his stomach rupture, and almost made him disabled. All because they feared him or maybe it was jealousy.
On September 4, 2014 he wrote me a letter among many. He wrote,
“..... I want you to realize I would lay down and die for you, take a bullet for you, take on torture for you, I would endure eternal pain to keep you from harm. I am a good feeling man, I work hard. I want to make an honest living, own a farm. Keep you happy for… how about forever?”
In another one he writes,
“Love we will be ?,
First words I said to you”You are breathtaking.” The few words that I thought were too strong and would’ve scared you away…. Yet here we are…. 5 solid weeks later and dreams coming true. Our love still on fire… flourishing like the flowers in a garden. Keeping your love is all I want…….”
The letters bring me to tears every time I read them. They are not the sad tears someone would get if they were sad, no. They are the tears of pure happiness. Moments like this, small things I will cherish for the rest of my life
A month has past since he was jumped first. He died several times during surgery. Each time I could have lost him. He was in so much pain, just pure misery. I begged him to hold on that night before surgery. He cried to me, he was so scared of death. My heart shattered into a million pieces. Almost losing the only person who cared and loved me for me when everyone else just gave up or just didn’t care. Nick and my best friend Miles are the only people I can really turn to. It was the worst feeling in the world.
I thought everything was going fine. We were so happy as can be. He was finally healed and we grew so much closer, the bond we had was unbreakable. The only bad part was that we aren’t with each other, 3,759 miles apart to be exact. All was going great until that one phone call made my world come crashing down. During the day he seemed really weird while texting me, very distant and confused. But when he called me later that night I understood why.
It happened again, he was jumped by a group of people once again. This time it wasn’t at school and was worse than the last. He was walking through town when they jumped him. They beat him, kicked him, and punched him. Knocking him down when he tried to be a man and fight back. He tried to hit them but one pulled out a gun and shot him in the leg. He couldn’t take the pain anymore and gave up trying.
A broken rib that punctured a lung, broken arm, bullet wound in his leg, bumps and bruises, and small bleeding on the brain. It took away his ability to paint and draw. He was an amazing artist. He was a Picasso reincarnation. But out of all that the worst past was his memory lost. He had no memory of who I was. Didn’t even know his own mother. His doctor told him while he was sedated he kept saying my name but when he woke up he had no clue who the name belonged to. I sat there as he told me that my name didn’t ring a bell, didn’t spark any memory of me at all. The only thing that he recognized was what I looked like. Almost three months and nothing. All of our memories gone, everything we went through gone.
The pain in my heart was absolute agony. I cried so hard no noise came out, only a faint whisper of despair. At the same time he kept calming me down even though he didn’t remember me. I could hardly think, my mind was a blur. My first instinct was to remind him of everything to spark something and also to fully tell him how I felt.
His memory slowly was coming back, three hours of revisiting memories. I couldn’t help but smile, but in my mind I was still worried. I got to witness him fall back in love with me. At one point he was just all sappy, yet shocked. He kept telling me I was beautiful and that I was heaven sent. I have a hard time still believing I could ever be that beautiful to him. I believe that what we have is real. I may be young’ but the feeling I had was real. Deep down I could feel it, all from my heart.
“I don’t know if I have ever told you this and I’m afraid I’ll scare you away, but I love you. In this moment right now, I have fallen in love with you all over again.” He spoke the words that reassured hope for us.
“You won’t scare me away saying that. Everything will go back to normal Nick, we just have to give it time.” I whispered through my tears. These tears were not just happy tears, but some left over from finding out the relationship we built could have been lost for who knows how long.
That moment I shall never forget. That experience reminds me of a movie I once watched called The Vow. It’s about a couple who gets into an accident and the wife forgets ever being married to her husband. Time passes and they fall in love all over again.
When we first met he opened my eyes to a new world, everything seemed brighter. He taught me that life has a written song. In every song there’s a story about a moment in time. They say you have choices and circumstances, some things we can’t control and some we can.
In life you’re the artist, the problem with most artist now and days is that they are trying to capture everything around them. They don’t stop and capture the beauty in one moment. There’s a beautiful song in every disastrous moment, people need to stop and listen closely. The whistling in the wind, rustling of the trees, every sound is a part of life’s symphony.
In the times I thought my world was ending I heard the song he was talking about. Out of all the bad things that has happened in the time that I’ve known him, that song has been playing softly the entire time. But when I finally listened it wasn’t just coming from life, it was coming from my heart. In the beginning I knew I had feelings for him. My heart grew larger the more I got to know him. But in those moments where it was one the verge of losing the only person who cared for me, the only person that meant a lot to me, it hit me all at once. I loved him. Almost losing him made me realize my true feelings for him . He is the only person who truly cares about me when everyone else wanted to give up on me. No one has ever cared about me as much as he does.