One year later.

This time last year I was lying in hospital, wondering how it could have happened.  It was 24 hours after the worst day of my life.  I couldn't open my eyes or move my neck.  My bed was damp from the fluid that leaked from my scorched flesh.

4 seasons.  365 days.  52 weeks.  Time has passed; a whole year of it.

I am both celebrating and commiserating this long and dramatic 12 months.  You can only cheer when events like an accident are relegated to the past.  It's a relief when pain becomes a distant, faded memory spoken about in cliched terms, the words blurred through retelling.  This is the celebration side, feeling, in fact KNOWING you have lived through it and burst out the other side.

A year is such a long time and at 27 years old it's a rather large percentage of my life.  This is the saddest part; acknowledging that some of my precious time on this earth has been lost to pain, fear and recovery.

My mantra has been 'by this time next year' and that is partly one of the reasons I have found this anniversary so bitter.  It is now 'this time next year' and I still have a long way to go.  I'm still having operations and treatment, wearing compression vests and I'm not yet back at work full-time.  It's difficult to accept that my mantra will be valid until next year at least!

Now I've reached 'the day' I'm strangely settled.  Leading up to the final Friday at school I'd experienced a tumult of emotion and going in to work, the accident site, became a day-to-day struggle.  I've been feeling as though I'm repeating the same actions, even the same words, on the lead up to the summer holidays.  It's usually all part of the fun and the excitement of the last day of term.  This year, it just felt like Groundhog Day.

People keep saying, 'hasn't it gone quickly!'  Perhaps to them, it has.  For me, it's been one of the longest, most drawn out processes; agonizingly, tormentingly slow.  Think back to your last Summer Holiday, a year or so ago.  Now does it feel long ago?

The good thing about first anniversaries is that they only come once and now I can look behind me at it's distant figure, wreathed in the fog of the past.