A pain rang through my body, causing me to double over and shut my eyes.

I forced myself up, and walked with a limp that caused the pain to repeat itself every time I'd lay a foot down. I looked around, through the light fog, trying find someone or something, anything. But I wouldn't find anyone, I was lost in the middle of nowhere.

I don't remember falling asleep, and nothing before that. It was like I never existed before now, and it felt like it; I don't know where I am, who I am, or what I'm doing here. Trying to remember anything before now had me thinking until my head hurt.

The silence broke when I suddenly heard thunder crack through the grey clouds in the distance. Suddenly waking from my reverie, I noticed and took in my surroundings; to the left of me there was quiet lake, and to the right there was a forest where the fog got thicker deeper into it.

Pain overtook me as I lay back down onto the ground, and stare ahead at the forest. Something was there, something important.

"It's already been a week and no other family has come for her," The nurse informed the curious eighteen year old.

He ran his tongue over his lips as he stared into the room that housed the sleeping girl; the same girl that was in the other car during the time of the accident just a week ago. The day of the news of his father's death, he managed to find her room. He still had his mother, but she had no one left.

He visited daily, enough times now to have her nurse know him by name and face, to make sure he was the first person she saw as soon as she woke up. He wanted her to know, yet he didn't. It could hurt her physically as well as emotionally. He wanted to be there, for this stranger, because he knew how it felt to lose his family; something made him want to help her.

"What happens when she wakes up and no one is there for her?" He asked the nurse, even though he already knew the answer.

"She'll have to be sent to one of the hospital's inbuilding orphanages to be registered for adoption. If she wakes, she'll most likely have lost her memory, it'd be dangerous for her to be out in this world alone," She said before she dismissed herself to help another patient.

"I don't think it's fair that I'm able to just walk away from this like nothing happened," His expression softened as he stood from the doorway and watched her, "While you're as close to dying as you are surviving."

He stood there without a clear reason to be there. He didn't know what made him want to be there for her, but he did. He waited for her to open her eyes and wake up, to curiously stare at him as he cried for her, knowing that the doe-eyed girl that stared at him without a clue in the world, had lost her family in one of the cruelest ways ever. For her to wake up, and make him feel the guilt while at the same time relieved, but she couldn't.

He left without a goodbye.

장 엔드 | Waking up would stop me