16 Jan. 03

Just before I turned 27, I had the worst day of my life. Since then I had another almost worst day of my life, but it's going to be hard to top that other one. I was in the beautiful city of Barcelona, with Jerome. We were sitting on a beautiful beach, watching the sun come closer to the horizon. It was quiet and peaceful and so nearly perfect.

My mobile phone rang. It was my aunt. She was calling from across the Atlantic ocean. She was completely calm. She needed my sister's phone number. My sister's good friend Aline's father was my father's business partner. She needed to reach this man. You see, my parents had had a car accident. So she needed to talk to him. Her calm was an instant indication that something was horribly wrong. She is not calm. Not ever, under any circumstance.

The girl's father, Philip, was needed, to drive to the coast and see what he could do to help them at the hospital. They had a head-on collision on the way home from the beach. There was nothing left of the car. She kept talking about the car. I asked if she has spoken to my parents. She said she had, to both. I asked her again. She hesitated. I knew she was lying. I started to cry, and yell, and tell her she was scaring me. I wanted a reaction. She continued perfectly calm.

I hung up the phone and breathed. I cried and cried. Jerome just sat next to me. He didn't ask, didn't say anything, didn't touch me. He did exactly what I needed him to do. I called my sister, and asked her to call home. She is supposed to be the artistic, dramatic, depressive one. She handled it perfectly well, while I couldn't even see the ocean in front of me anymore.

Throughout the next 24 hours, little by little, information came. There was a man who broke up with his girlfriend. He had a motorbike. He saw her talking to another man, and in a fit, tried to run over her with the bike. He tried to kill her. The people around them reacted. They went after him. In order to escape, he stole a car, and took off. The police were after him. He took the windy road up the coast. He lost control of his car, and it crossed the road to the oncoming traffic. To my oncoming parents. Head on.

My father managed to get out of the car, and walked around it to my mother's side, to try to get her out. He lost consciousness before he reached her. A man who stopped to help them caught him and prevented his head from hitting the concrete. They stretched him out on the road and waited for the ambulance. My mother sat in the car, immobilized by pain. She couldn't open her door. When the ambulance people arrived, they concentrated on the other driver, who had visible fractures. They cut him out of his car, and put him in an ambulance with my father.

They took my mother out of the car and put her in a second ambulance. She couldn't speak.

The next day my phone rang again. It was Philip, Aline's father. They had moved my parents to another hospital, in town. They each had a room, and they were under observation. My father had fractured his sternum, my mother was in incredible pain. He said my father wanted to talk to me. My father is a big man, strong, athletic, healthy. He is never sick. He was stuck in a hospital bed, about ten thousand kilometers away from me. When I heard his voice, I choked. I couldn't speak, I could only wail. When he heard me, he couldn't speak either. I think this alone was the hardest moment in my life. Philip took the phone. He explained that with a fractured sternum, you shouldn't cough, or laugh, or breathe deeply, because this would move it. With a fractured sternum you shouldn't cry.

My mother still wasn't speaking. She was in atrocious pain. She wanted to stay in the hospital, with drugs and pain-killers.

I went home the next day. It was still an ocean away. I still couldn't see them. They went home, they suffered with their pain, they tried to recuperate. I desperately wanted to know what had happened to this man. Was he dead? Was he in jail? In hospital? Crippled? I don't know what happened to him. I don't think anything did. I think the legal system will leave him hanging and he will remain free.

I don't believe in punishment. I don't think it solves problems. But I wish that I could talk to him. I want to tell him what his fury did to me and my family. I want him to know about the worst day of my life. I want him to know that he is responsible for it.