I stayed over at Kody’s house that night. Neither of us wanted to be alone; neither of us could handle being alone. His parents said I could stay as long as I liked, but I knew it didn’t really matter to them-- they were so wrapped up in their jobs that they probably wouldn’t notice. We called your parents as soon as we could, and they told us everything. You had coded in the ambulance-- your heart had stopped beating for ten minutes before they revived you. When you reached the hospital, you were taken immediately into emergency surgery, where you remained at the time of the call. It was undetermined how much brain damage you had suffered, if any.
It was a restless night. Kody fell asleep by the phone, waiting for another call from your parents. I couldn’t sleep at all. I tried everything to distract myself-- video games, my favorite movie, even reading, which never fails to put me to sleep. I guess I was waiting for the call too, that night. If the worst happened…
No. I refused to think about it.
The three of us, Kody, you, and I, that is, have only one common interest between us-- a desire to write. It’s a wonder that with only that, our friendship had survived at all, much less becoming as close as family to me. I suppose that our common goal is strong enough to overlook our vastly different personalities.
You want to be a writer of fiction-- of tales of dragons and demon and master sword-wielders, of kings and queens and necromancers. God, you could do it too. You have a gift for crafting sentences, the likes of which I have never seen in any literary work, published or not.
Kody wants to write music. He wants to use his music to voice his sadness, his anger, his happiness through the forms of black and white hieroglyphics that make no sense to me. But when he plays, I understand. He too possesses a great gift-- yes, he is accurate at playing, but there is more than that. He puts more emotion, more feeling into the music than any pianist I’ve ever heard.
And me? Well, I just want to write video game programming. Definitely not as complex as the ambitions of you and Kody, but I just don’t have a gift for anything special like you two do.
You were definitely the leader out of the three of us, the floatation device that kept Kody and I from sinking. And suddenly, your presence was gone, leaving us to struggle to stay afloat.
These were my thoughts the next morning as we were signing in at the hospital. Your parents met us by the giant metal ICU doors. As we walked down the hallway, they explained last night’s events.
“Something went wrong during surgery,” your father began. Kody interrupted with a loud sob, and your father waited to finish his explanation until I had calmed him down.
“Sophia went into cardiac arrest, meaning her heart stopped again. She’s on a ventilator right now… but I’ve got to warn you, she does not look good. Are you going to be alright, son?” he asked Kody, who was wheezing now. I rubbed circles on his back and whispered to him.
“She needs us, Kody. Keep it together. She needs us now, when she was there for us all these years.”
Kody nodded, and together we opened the doors to your room.
There was a tube down your throat. A heart monitor beeped a steady rhythm, a march to suppress death.
Do you remember the first time it snowed? You dragged us outside, dragged us from the comfort of our warm houses, our warm beds. You dragged us outside and you danced as the sky opened up above you, danced until your hair was piled with snow, until your cheeks were red with the vibrancy of life, until your eyes shone brighter than the stars overhead.
How could you have looked like that only mere days ago? Now your skin was as pale as your thin bedsheet, the color of paper. Your lips were white and chapped. Your hands were curled around the sheets, delicate and poised, as if you were a sculpture. Your eyes were closed, and I wondered-- if I were to force them open, would they still be shining?
Kody and I sat down next to you, grabbing your hands. Your skin held only a fraction of the warmth it had the day before when I had hugged you before your fencing tournament.
Surprisingly, Kody was not crying anymore. Instead, he stared at your face with an expression of complete determination.
“You will wake up,” Kody whispered, and I wondered if he was talking to you or to himself.
My stomach lurched, and for a single second I felt the overwhelming urge to vomit. Would my last words to you be “good luck”? No, you were simply not going to die. Only twenty-four hours ago you were full of life, full of untapped potential. You were a hurricane of movement, and without warning, the storm broke.
My heart ached. I got up and left the room, dimly aware that Kody was following me.
I blamed myself, despite the fact that deep down, I knew there was nothing I could’ve done. Just the fact that I had watched you disappear down that hallway without calling your name left a bottomless pit in my stomach. I missed your bright smile, your warm laugh, the way you seemed to light up the room without even knowing it. I wanted to scream, I wanted to cry, but instead I just felt a dull, aching numbness.
“Where are the restrooms?” I asked a nurse at the counter. She pointed without looking up from her computer.
In the bathroom I splashed water on my face. Keep it together, Matt, I thought to myself. A man took up the sink next to me. I studied his face in the mirror. I had seen him before. He turned to leave. On the back of his jacket, stitched in bright red letters were the words “Kisuke’s fencing dojo”.
“Hey!” I barked before I could stop myself. He turned around. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”
“Who are you?” the man asked calmly.
“You stabbed her! You caused this. Why are you here?”
“I’m sorry, it was an accident. I came as soon as I could, I-I wanted to make sure she was alright,” he said, but I didn’t care. I wanted someone to blame, anyone but myself.
I launched myself at him, throwing punches blindly. He dodged easily with reflexes gained from years of fencing.
“Matt, no!” Kody yelled.
The man slipped out of the room, and my punch continued past where he had stood only moments before. My fist connected with the mirror and it shattered. I glanced at my knuckles, watching dimly as blood pooled on the tile floor under me. I looked at my cracked reflection in the mirror, and I didn’t recognize the person staring back at me.
I sunk to my knees and dissolved into tears.

Working as a nurse, one of the most heartbreaking things to witness is the moment family and friends realize their loved one will not wake up. I didn’t want anyone to go through that, but none so much as your friends. Working as a nurse, you don’t realize how attached you get to your patients-- you really do care. And you were no exception. No, I cared about you more than I have with any other patient. Even though I had never met you before, I knew what kind of person you were just by listening to what your friends told me.
January 1st, 2016. The New Year, and instead of spending it partying like most teenagers do, you spent it in a hospital bed. Your two friends were there, too-- they had not failed to visit you since you had been admitted to the hospital.
The taller one stood up. “I’m going to get us dinner, Kody,” he whispered, placing a hand on the smaller boy’s back. Kody nodded mutely, and the other boy left.
I entered your room, checking your vitals and IV drip. You’d been on the ventilator for four days now, which was not long at all. Your friends and family remained nothing but hopeful. Secretly, I was hoping along with them.
After a moment's hesitation, I sat down next to the boy. “She’s a pretty girl,” I said. “And lucky, too, to have such great friends.”
If he thought it was strange for the nurse to initiate conversation with him, he didn’t show it.
“I’ve only ever seen her look weak like this once before. We were all sleeping over at my house-- her, Matt, and me. She had disappeared, and just when I was getting worried I heard the sound of retching from the bathroom. The door’s lock didn’t work, so I went in. She was kneeling down at the toilet seat with her finger down her throat, silver tears running down her face like liquid moonlight.
“‘Bulimia,’ I remember thinking. ‘Such an ugly word for such a beautiful girl.’
“When she saw me, she collapsed, folded in on herself as if she had been pressed down by some invisible force, like a house of cards in the wind. Maybe she was scared of what I would do after finding out. Or maybe she was relieved that she wasn’t alone anymore. Maybe I’ll never know.” Kody took a deep breath and continued.
“I ran over to her and pulled her close, held her there on the bathroom floor. I wiped the tears off of her face carefully, as if she were made of glass. And I wished I was good with words so that I could tell her everything I was thinking. I hoped that the touch of my fingers would be enough to convey what I thought. That she was beautiful. That she was perfect just the way she was. That it physically hurt me to see her like this. That she didn’t need to change herself for anyone.
“That I loved her. God, I loved her. Every single day I fell more in love with her, hopelessly tangled up in her. But I didn’t tell her-- I couldn’t find the words, didn’t want to ruin our friendship. Every excuse I could come up with I used so I could just enjoy being next to her, enjoy her laugh and her smile and her presence. And now, I can’t help but wonder-- will I ever get to tell her how I feel?” He stood up and left the room without another word.
“You just did,” I whispered.
***
It was a while before I saw any of your friends again. Winter break had ended, and class was in session once again. I worried about all of the classes you were missing. I found myself visiting you during my free time, during breaks or after my shift had ended. I read some of my favorite books to you, things that I figured you would read in English class-- The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird. The kind of books where somebody always dies in the end. Maybe not the best choice for your situation, but I read them anyway.
One day I walked into your room to find the other boy sitting beside your bed, shoulders hunched. When he raised his head, I noticed he had a giant black eye.
“How’s she been doing?” he asked me without looking away from you.
“There’s been no change in vitals. She could stay like this for any number of days.”
He nodded numbly, accustomed to the news. “Do you ever wish you could take a redo? Go back to one moment and change one thing? Because if I could, I would go back and stop her from entering that tournament. Everything’s changed without her. I’ve known for a while things were bound to change. It just felt like we were in the enchanted carriage, you know? Everything was magical, but it didn’t last. We were right in the middle of our ride when it turned back into a pumpkin.
“Kody and I don’t know how to function without her. It’s sad, actually. Kody’s gone back to never talking. I’ve started getting into fights again,” he needlessly pointed to his eye. “I guess I’m looking for somebody to blame. Anybody but myself.
“She’s made such a huge impact on my life. My family has been in a bad spot for a while… my mother died of cancer when I was eight, and my dad drank to avoid the pain. That and the hospital bills put us deep into debt. We almost lost everything. Her family helped us, more than we can ever repay… and now, in their time of crisis, we’re doing our best. But there’s nothing we can do to ease the pain.”
“You’ve seen the cuts on her arms and legs, right?” He asked.
As her nurse, of course I had. We had all just figured they were injuries from fencing, maybe accidental cuts from her sword or something.
“Those weren’t accidents. She’s a deeply unhappy person. Of all the people I know, she’s the person who deserves to be going through what she’s going through the least. The worst part is that there is no real reason for her to be feeling this way except for the fact that she just is; I can’t even help her.
“The saddest part is that I didn’t notice, not for a while. I never even stopped to think that she could have something going on behind closed doors, something that she didn’t tell even Kody and me.
“I’m a pretty selfish person, aren’t I? I want her to live for me, when really living is the last thing that she wants to do.”

Where am I, again? I ask myself. Oh right. I’m inside my mind. Yes, I remember now. Inside my mind. That’s such a strange place to be, isn’t it? But here I am, trapped inside of myself.
Time passes irregularly here, wherever ‘here’ may be. Sometimes, minutes crawl by as slowly as hours. Then there are the times when I slip away for a moment and days have passed.
Memories pass by lazily, like a neverending dream. I am reliving my life, watching myself grow up, revisiting moments I had buried into the deepest recesses of my mind.
I’m a small child again, standing at the side of the road. My cat darts past me, crossing through the sea of cars. About halfway, she gets steamrolled by a semi truck. I remember this. In this moment, I stare with a dull interest at the spot where the kitten had been only moments before, and I consider taking the same fate. Instead, I get my mother.
“Mommy, Felicity got run over by a car.”
My mother doesn’t even look at me. “Sorry, honey, we’ll buy you a new one.”
“But I don’t want a new one. I want Felicity.”
But she’s already turned away. The scene changes.
I walk in the house in the afternoon after getting off of the school bus. Mom and Dad are fighting again. I slip past the kitchen, the danger zone, and head for the comfort of my room.
But I can’t stay there long. My stomach growls in protest. I’ve forgotten to refill my emergency supply of snacks. I go to the kitchen.
I can feel the tension in the air. It’s so thick, I can hardly breathe. I slink over to the pantry and grab a bag of chips and attempt to make my escape.
Unfortunately, that would be too easy. My mother and father both start screaming at me at once. I endure it, letting their words blend together so that I understand none of it.
They don’t mean it, I tell myself. At least, I don’t think they do. But why, then, do they hate me so much?
My dad calls me fat. Tears well up in my eyes and I run out of the kitchen before another word is spoken. And I wish that I could just find the courage to die.
It was almost a relief when my parents finally divorced. The sounds of fighting were replaced by the silence of a broken home, but it was still better than the constant screaming I had endured for years. Until my stepfather moved in, that is.
He is a greasy man, unemployed, who spent most of his day lounging in front of the TV, occasionally taking time out to yell at me for something. I watch every fight I had with him, and I realize something I should’ve realized a long time ago-- he never cared about me. None of my parents did.
I see every time I cried myself to sleep, every time I took a blade to a pillow and ripped it into shreds, until the pillow was as torn up as I felt inside. I see both the good and the bad and the ugly and I suddenly hate myself for those hours when I sat in my room and felt bad for myself, for the times that I didn’t want to live anymore. I regret the wasted hours, days, weeks. And I start wondering what will happen when I reach that moment, when everything that I had spent so long threading together came unraveled, stitch by stitch.
December 28th. I watch myself walk down the hallway and I try to scream but I can’t make a sound. I follow Matt and Kody out to the seats, watch as I take the stage. And I can’t do anything but watch as the sword begins its descent over my unprotected stomach.
My vision goes black. I hear the commotion as the medical teams rushed out from behind the stage. It faded into the background as white noise.
I sit up suddenly. Fluorescent light meets my eyes and blinds me momentarily. Looking around, I notice that my entire family is packed into the small hospital room like sardines: my mother, my father, my brother, even my stepfather. Matt and Kody are there too-- as soon as I see the expression on their faces, I know something is wrong.
A doctor walks into the room and there is instant uproar. Matt is shouting something at the doctor, the doctor is trying to say something to my parents, my father is screaming at Kody and-- Kody is just standing there, looking at me solemnly. I try to say something, try to draw their attention, but my voice is lost in the chaos and goes unheard. The doctor glances down at a clipboard and then turns to Matt.
“Son, if you don’t stop this nonsense I will call security and have you escorted from this hospital.”
Matt’s internal struggle with himself is plainly obvious, but eventually he succumbs and flops down in an empty chair, drained of energy. The doctor looks once again at the clipboard.
“She’s been in a state of unconsciousness for over a year now.”
I laugh. Is this a joke? I’m sitting right here… aren’t I?
“Have you thought any about my suggestion since the last time we met?”
All eyes turn to me, and suddenly I understand. My mind is just playing cruel tricks on me once again; the eyes of my family and friends seem to stare right through me, as if they were looking at a reflection in the water. I collapse against the bed and stare at the white ceiling.
My family nods. “We’re ready to let go,” my stepfather says simply, without any emotion whatsoever.
Suddenly I am sitting upright again, flooded with anger. How dare he speak as if he were my family? He sits on our sofa and watches our TV and eats our food and doesn’t spare me a second glance except to watch me do chores all afternoon from his comfy spot on the couch. And yet he thinks it is his authority to tell the doctor of my parents’ decisions?
Matt launches to his feet. “How dare you talk like that! You don’t give a crap about her, you’re not her family, this isn’t your decision to make! I can’t believe you, talking about this in front of her face! You just want her dead so you don’t have to use your precious betting money to keep her alive. What kind of parents would rather let their child die, anyway?”
I am grateful, at least, for Matt’s attempt to defend me, but security rushes in, obviously waiting for his next outburst, and grabs Matt by the arms. They drag him down the hallway until his yells of protest are lost to the distance.
My mother turns to the doctor. “We’ve thought about it,” she says. “And we’ve decided that letting her go really is the best thing. For all of us,” she adds with a glance to Kody, as if expecting him to protest. He doesn’t. Instead, he grabs my hand gently. 
“I know you’re there. I know it. Wake up. Please, Sophie, wake up. Do it for me, or for Matt, or for your mom or dad or brother. Please,” he begs, and on the last word his voice cracks like a branch in a thunderstorm.
I heard what Kody said that day when he was talking to the nurse. There’s no worse feeling than hearing someone’s voice crack when they’re right about to cry; when they’re telling you they love you and you can’t make your mouth move to respond.
And Matt. He had said that he was the selfish one, but really, that was me. Never once did I think about them. All I cared about was the temporary high of relief. And now, I would pay the highest price.
I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. The doctor says something about letting me go immediately. He hands his precious clipboard over, and my mother and father both sign something on the white sheet.
I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die.
The doctor’s hand reaches to unplug the black cord, my single connection to life. It is so simple, and yet the hand of death closes around it. Life slows down for an incredible second and I realize that my family didn’t even say goodbye. Or maybe they had been saying goodbye all along. I don’t know which is worse.
And then I look at Kody. His hair is greasy and sticking up in random places. His head is bowed-- I can’t see his expression, but tears fall from his face onto the hospital blanket like snowdrops.
And I think of the first time it snowed.
And I realize that’s what I want to live for, more than anything else in the world. I want to live for the simple moments that I took for granted before. I want to live, and now it’s too late.
I’m sorry, Kody.
The doctor pulls the plug.
I sputter and wheeze and gasp for air.
I’m alive.

The doctor watched you, stunned into paralyzation, as you raked in your first independent breath in over a year. Your small chest heaved, as if it were collapsing under the weight of the world. You coughed and choked on the dry air and your eyes parted ever so slightly.
The doctor suddenly started moving again. He shouts orders at nurses and surgeons. The tube, which had previously been assisting you breathing but now only served as an obstruction, was removed from your throat. You coughed and coughed. After you finished, you looked around in a daze. And then your eyes met mine.
“Sophia…” I whispered. “You’re alive.”
She looked at me carefully.
“Kody,” she whispered.
***
You spent a week in the hospital being monitored by the doctors and attending physical therapy. Having worked yourself as hard as you physically could, you walked out of the hospital on March 7th, 2015. We were with you as you stepped out into the cold air that morning.
You fell to your knees. At first, Matt and I thought there was something wrong. Your shoulders heaved, and then I realized-- you were both laughing and crying at the same time. You pressed your forehead to the ground and I watched your lips move silently, a prayer sent to a god unknown to us. I watched your tears hit the ground and shatter as if they were glass. Your cheeks were red and flushed, your eyes were bright, and I finally got to hear your laugh again, a sound that I swear I will never forget. And then I noticed the tiny, insignificant little specks dotting your hair.
Snow.