Wasted Words by Staci Hart

nothing but lust for life. Now I was only filled with memories of that time, the longing for that feeling. Six years hadn’t been long enough to forget them completely.
    I supposed I never would, which was a blessing and a curse.
    I breathed deep as I headed toward the subway station, feeling the cold air in my lungs, remembering that I was alive. That made the loss easier to accept.  
    The day I was injured found its way into my mind as it so often did, in flashes of memories, smells, sounds. The crowd roaring. The glint of sun off the defensive line’s helmets as we squared up. The crash of pads, screams and grunts of players, like we were at war. I remembered the tackle, remembered falling, but then there was nothing, only blackness, until I woke up at the hospital.  
    They told me the stories of what happened, and I saw the tape once — it was all I could handle. The play ended, and everyone stood, except me. I lay sprawled out on the grass, body still. Too still. I knew watching it that I wasn’t breathing. I don’t think many people in the stadium were either.  
    A hush fell over the crowd, an eerie impossibility to have thousands of people nearly silent as medics ran onto the field. My helmet was removed carefully, gingerly — being paralyzed wouldn’t matter if they didn’t because I would have died right then, right there if they hadn’t.  
    Watching someone perform CPR on my lifeless body was one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced. They pumped my chest, breathed for me until my lungs began to work again, both teams circling my body in silence.  
    I stopped breathing for over a minute before they resuscitated me. And then they moved me onto a board and I left the field in an ambulance.
    A little more pressure would have snapped my neck. A slight shift in the angle would have ended my life.  
    My first sense of awareness was only sounds and blurred shapes in flashes and bursts, and when I finally woke, it was coughing against the hard tube in my throat. I tried to fight it, tried to pull it out, but I couldn’t. Not my hands, my arms, legs — my entire body lay useless on the hospital bed.  
    Terror. That was all I felt — pure terror pressing me from all directions. I was locked in my body like a prison cell. My mom called for the nurse, crying, my dad on the other side of me, telling me to stay calm, that it would be okay. But my eyes darted around the room in panic, blurring from shock and the pain of knowing that he was wrong. Nothing would ever be okay again.
    Once they’d removed my breathing tube and I’d calmed down, they told me that I’d suffered a spinal injury to my top two vertebrae, said that the next seventy-two hours would tell us how much damage had been done, how much of it was permanent. They said I was young and strong, that the odds were in my favor. They said we just had to wait and see.
    It was the longest three days of my life.
    All that I wanted, aside from to go back and do it all differently, was to be alone. I wanted to think. I wanted to cry. I wanted to try to claw my way out of the avalanche, but it seemed like miles before I could reach the air. Before I could breathe. But I looked into the eyes of my mother and father, and that’s where I found strength.  
    It was weak at first, a glimmering thread of hope that forced me to smile, to tell them I was okay, that I’d be all right, even if I didn’t believe it. But at the end of that first day, as I lay in the bed I couldn’t feel underneath me, I quietly begged my fingers to move, sent the command down my arms as I had thousands of times that day, a mantra repeated over and over, until finally, they did.
    There have been few times in my life that I’ve felt so elated, so emotional, so much . As if every fiber of me vibrated with hope, possibility, and determination.
    The hope sprang from there. By the next morning — I didn’t sleep, just lay awake, willing my body to listen, to come back to life