THE YEAR DEATH GOT MY NAME WRONG

I’ve always believed May babies come into the world stubborn. Maybe it’s the Taurus in us: hoofs dug deep, head low, refusing to be told when it’s time to go. Nobody had to convince me of that. Life tried to erase me more than once, and every time, I wrote my name back into the world with whatever ink I had left—blood, breath, or bone.

But the night everything finally broke open—the night that would circle back and start digging up the past before I ever knew there was a past worth digging—I wasn’t thinking about destiny, or astrology, or survival. I was just a girl standing at a bus stop in the wrong place, at the wrong time, next to a boy who never deserved how hard I loved him.

Terrell.

Even his name feels like a bruise now.

The street was cold that night. Not winter cold, but the kind of Cleveland chill that creeps up after sunset, the way regret creeps up after truth. Streetlights buzzed like dying insects, flickering gold over our shoulders. I remember watching the shadows ripple across the pavement as a car rolled by slow—too slow—and thinking nothing of it.

I should’ve trusted my instincts.

I always had good instincts.

But people mistake softness for blindness, and love for stupidity.

I didn’t see the man step forward, not until his shadow eclipsed mine. I didn’t hear any argument. No warning. Just—

POP.

A sound so loud it swallowed the whole night. Then a ring—one that wasn’t in the air but inside my skull, rattling against bone like loose change.

I felt myself falling before I felt myself hit.

Except…I didn’t feel myself hit at all.

I watched my body crumble like something boneless, a puppet cut free. But I couldn’t lift my hands. I couldn’t brace myself. My arms dangled helplessly, like my nerves had been unplugged. Shock should’ve numbed me, but this wasn’t numbness. This was absence. My ligaments stopped listening to me.

My face hit the concrete. Hard.

I tasted blood—iron, warm, almost sweet.

And somehow…

I was still awake.

Paralyzed, but awake.

I could see, I could hear, I could understand.

The world tilted. The man who shot me turned and sprinted down the street—running from a scene he created and probably practiced in his mind a hundred times.

And Terrell?

The man I loved?

He froze.

He didn’t scream.

He didn’t kneel.

He didn’t even reach for me.

He became a statue carved out of fear.

It’s wild how someone can love you at 3 p.m. and become a stranger by 3:01. All he did was stare, wide-eyed, hands limp, legs locked, as if his body wouldn’t give him permission to move.

Later he’d claim it was shock.

But looking back, I wonder if it was guilt.

Sirens pierced the ringing in my skull. An ambulance stopped right beside me, but by then I had somehow gotten back on my feet—standing in a daze, half-alive, half-dead, with warm blood sliding down the side of my face.

The paramedics looked me up and down like I confused them.

“Do you want to go home,” one asked, “or to the hospital?”

Home.

As if I’d just scraped my knee.

As if a bullet wasn’t lodged somewhere in my head.

Then he added, almost casually:

“I should inform you—you’re bleeding from your head.”

Should inform me?

It was the calmest warning I’d ever heard.

“Hospital,” I said.

Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I just nodded. Everything was muffled, like I was underwater.

The hospital was five minutes away. Five minutes between life and death. They put me in an ICU room right away, machines humming, nurses whispering like I was already halfway gone.

Terrell sat beside my bed, but he didn’t touch me. Didn’t speak. Didn’t even look at me for long. He kept staring at the wall, his leg bouncing, fingers twitching. Scared. Stiff. Detached.

He stayed frozen even when my pain returned like a vengeance.

At first it was a small headache.

Then three minutes later, worse.

Then two minutes after that, it felt like a hammer smashing through my skull.

I screamed. Loud enough to shake the hallway.

I ripped the sheets away and stumbled toward the door, desperate for help, desperate for anyone who wasn’t paralyzed by the moment.

But Terrell…

He didn’t move.

Not when I screamed.

Not when I cried.

Not when I held my head like it was splitting open.

He just sat there.

Like a man waiting for someone else to claim responsibility.

Like he knew he couldn’t save me when the gun was pulled—so he wasn’t going to try now either.

By the time I reached the doorway, the world blinked.

I saw my own body fall before I felt it fall.

It was the strangest thing—like my soul had stepped backward while my body kept going forward. Like my spirit paused to watch my physical self collapse into a limp heap.

And then?

Nothing.

Dark.

A void without temperature or dimension.

I woke up to my mother’s voice…

But not really awake.

More like floating between worlds.

They cut off all my hair.

They drilled.

They stitched.

They prayed.

Doctors told my mother I might not survive the next 24 hours.

And if I did, I’d be a vegetable.

Paralyzed on one side.

Barely functioning.

But while my body lay still, something else happened.

I saw myself sitting in a chair.

A simple chair, in a dark space with no walls, no ceiling, no sound.

And across from me—

A light.

Not above.

Not below.

Just…me.

Like my own soul was flickering.

Brightening.

Dimming.

Repeating.

No flames.

No demons.

No angels.

No dead relatives.

Just me watching myself almost disappear.

Purgatory?

Limbo?

A glitch between dimensions?

Who knows what name humans would give that place.

How many of us die and truly come back to report?

---

Twenty-four hours became four weeks.

Four weeks in a coma.

Four weeks with tubes down my throat and a laser aimed at my head, machines tracking every breath.

And when I finally stirred—

Not awake-awake, but aware—

I yanked the tube out of my throat on instinct.

My first words?

“I’m hungry.”

My mother cried.

She thought hunger meant hope.

I told her David—my oldest brother, my protector—had been sitting beside me the whole time, watching over me.

But David…

David was incarcerated.

He couldn’t have been there.

Still, I saw him.

Clear as day.

Then I told her, “Tomato said to tell you it’s going to be okay.”

My mother stared at me like I spoke in riddles.

“Who is Tomato?” she asked.

I didn’t know.

I wasn’t even fully conscious.

She thought I was predicting I’d wake up as a vegetable.

But the truth?

Even now I don’t know who or what Tomato was.

When my mother left the room, that’s when Terrell came back.

Slipped in like he belonged there.

Sat beside me like he earned that place.

I was still drugged, foggy, unable to move right.

Still halfway gone.

And that’s when he took advantage of me.

Not violently—no struggle, no fight—but in a way that made my stomach twist years later when I finally understood what had happened.

He had sex with me while I was barely aware, barely conscious, barely myself.

And when he finished, he broke up with me.

Just like that.

No emotion.

No shame.

He left me on my deathbed.

And I was too drugged to react with anything real.

I even told him goodbye in some sarcastic tone that didn’t feel like my own voice.

The next day, the doctor came in with a clipboard and a grim expression.

“You’re going to be a vegetable,” he said.

“The right side of your body will be paralyzed.”

I laughed.

Right in his face.

“Clearly you don’t know me,” I told him.

“If I can understand you, I’m not going to be a vegetable. Watch.”

He didn’t believe me.

But that night—

I ran.

Down the hallway.

Down the hospital corridor.

Down the memory of everything that tried to bury me.

It took four security guards to catch me.

When the doctor saw me back in my bed, he shook his head.

“You’ve made a miraculous recovery,” he said.

Damn right I had.

But physical healing was the easy part.

Mentally?

I was shredded.

My memory was short, scattered, slippery.

Conversations vanished minutes after I had them.

My brain felt like a broken filing cabinet—papers everywhere, labels missing.

They cut more hair off during physical therapy, and one day a nurse told me I’d punched another nurse right after waking from the coma.

I didn’t remember that either.

Six months.

Six months of training my mind like it was a muscle.

Six months of forcing myself to hold onto information, to rebuild pathways, to remember who I was.

I only lost fragments.

Small pieces.

But from the day I was shot until fifteen years later—I remembered everything.

Crystal clear.

Case Western University told me my scholarship for chemical engineering wouldn’t work anymore. I couldn’t retain new information long enough to succeed.

Losing that future hurt.

But it pushed me into the person I became:

A poet.

An artist.

A tattooist.

A mechanic with grease under her fingernails and a God-given refusal to quit.

All because life tried to end me.

And failed.

Two years after my recovery, Terrell saw me again—healthy, strong, alive.

He had the audacity to want me back.

I looked him dead in his eyes, Taurus fire in my chest.

“Why would I be with someone who left me on my deathbed?” I asked.

He had no answer.

Fifteen years later, he called again.

“Amber… meet me. I need to tell you the truth.”

The truth?

About the shooting?

The betrayal?

The girl from fifth grade whose mother turned out to be the mother of the shooter?

Or the part that scared him the most—

That digging up the past

meant uncovering a version of himself

he’d spent fifteen years running from.