Much worse.
While I stood in line at the toy store with the overpriced fairy doll tucked under my arm, I found myself staring absently at a display of cartoon character backpacks nearby, letting my mind wander back to places I usually tried not to go.
I was twenty-five when it happened. My second deployment with the Army, stationed in a region I still couldn’t talk about without my therapist present. One moment I’d been walking across a dirt road with my team, joking with Martinez about the terrible coffee in the mess hall, and the next there was fire and pressure and the sound of metal tearing through reality itself.
They told me later that our medic, Sullivan, had nearly lost me right there in the dust and blood and chaos. That he’d worked on me for eight minutes before the helicopter arrived.
The recovery had been brutal. Six surgeries. Fourteen months of physical therapy. Relearning how to stand, how to balance, how to shower without falling, how to not hate looking at my own body in the mirror.
