Black. Everything is black.
Is this what dying feels like? Am I already dead?
The adrenaline felt strange — sharp and hollow — but I hadn't expected the stabbing to still hurt. I always hated painful endings. Why did the thing I feared most keep happening to me?
More confusing: when will I see a light? How long have I been drifting in this nothingness?
The last memory was my older brother punching me for standing up to him after I told him to at least get a real job instead of wasting his life away.
…Huh. A light. I can— I can vaguely see something now.
What is that? What is this?
Though I cannot see clearly, I feel my mind — my consciousness — slowly pulling away from me.
Black.
The next thing she knew, she could open her eyes. Vision blurred, she realized someone was holding her; the world came back in fragments as clarity returned.
Is this heaven? If it is, then the person before me must be the most beautiful I have ever seen.
The woman holding her looked exhausted — sweating, panting. She opened her mouth to speak.
"Me alegro mucho de que hayas sobrevivido, querida mía…"
Huh? Do angels speak Spanish?
Then her head throbbed again; tears sprang to her eyes, and everything went black.
Then, once again, she opened her eyes.
White. The ceiling was brutally white — the kind of white that makes every sound sharper. For a moment she couldn't place where she was. The edges of the room smelled faintly of antiseptic and boiled water. A distant fan clicked. Someone whispered. Her chest tightened.
She felt it then — the hollow, impossible weight of exhaustion. Her body was heavy as a sack of stones. Moving felt like dragging herself through molasses. She forced herself to raise a hand, every tendon and joint protesting. When her fingers came into view, the world dropped out from under her.
A small hand. A very small, tiny hand. She stared at it as if it belonged to someone else, and the realization hit like a second knife.
She was a baby.
The scream that bubbled up at first skittered out as a high, helpless wail. Tears blurred her vision; she didn't know whether she was crying because she had been given a second chance or because the horror of it was too much to bear. Memory — every scar, every sharp-edged sentence she had ever said, the warmth of her brother's fist — sat intact behind her eyes like a film that refused to dissolve. She remembered. She remembered everything.
"WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?!"
The thought exploded through her, raw and incredulous. Her voice — if she could call it that now — shrank into the thin, frantic sounds she made. She flailed, panic and furious disbelief colliding.
Reborn, yes — but into what? Whose body? Why? And how was she supposed to live with all of those memories trapped inside something so small and fragile?
Footsteps approached. A soft voice murmured in Spanish again, closer this time:
"Shh, tranquila… ya pasó." The woman — the same woman from before? — cupped her face with hands that smelled of soap and lemon. For a second, her fingers brushed the tiny forehead and, inexplicably, heat raced through her chest.
As the room steadied around her, a sudden, terrible clarity rose: It was a beginning she hadn't asked for — and already, the future was waiting, louder than ever.