In my family all the women are stubborn, hard headed, and have been through something that would break most people. In the last four months, my family has lost relatives: my great grandmother and my aunt. My mother is like a brick wall, but when she’s with me it all comes crashing down.
And me, well, I act like nothing affects me. I’ve got the heart of stone. As if I were a ball, I think all the pain will roll off. In the last six years of my life, I’ve witnessed things that could kill someone, would eat them from the inside out, like a decaying corpse.
The car was screaming, burned alive by the fire that would take all of their lives. Every day I say to myself, why did god let me live? God, why did you let me live? Why must I suffer? I can still feel the smoke being consumed into my lungs, the burn it left in my throat and the click of my seatbelt as I crawled my way away from the hell of death.
The smell of blood, still fresh in my mind, the smell of blood, haunts me in my sleep. My mother tells me every day, “Sweetie I’m strong, but I don’t think I’d have the strength to lose you.”
I am strong, I am one of my family, every person in my family is strong, but we only have the will power to survive if we are together.