Isn't it weird how a single moment can change your life? How one chance encounter can send you hurtling down a road you never saw coming. How one wave, or wink, or smile, or shy 'hello' can turn your world on its head, be it for better, or for worse.
One moment you think you know exactly who you are, what you like, what you don't. You think life is sorted, tidy, all filed correctly, all present and correct. Then the next moment you're questioning everything, you're not so sure who you are, the things you thought you knew are murky and unsure, and your head is strewn with incomplete thoughts, total disarray, like someone has opened up the filing cabinet, and flung all the papers everywhere.
Life is full of those moments, those chance encounters, those heart warming smiles, those times you are filled with self-doubt because someone said something, or maybe didn't say what they should have. These moments, fantastic, questionable, enlightening, hear-warming, destructive, happy and sad, because they're not all good moments, but they all affect us in our day to day lives, Sometimes tipping the scales and making us rethink our paths.
There's no way of knowing when one of these moments will strike, or whether the next special moment will be good or bad, but as humans, I think, we all cling to the good ones when they come, and try to bounce back from the bad, however we best can.
People cope with their 'bad moments' as I've come to think of them in different ways, some are practical and others are probably more destructive than they originally intended. Some people can ask for help, some people already have a safety net in place for when that big bad moment comes and sweeps them off their feet. Others don't.
Others struggle, they stumble and fall, they get swept along in the undertow of a bad moment and have no one to reach out to, no safety line to pull themselves back ashore. These are the people who turn to more destructive methods, the ones who can't see a better way out. Those who think the answer may lie in a knife blade, a bottle of some kind of spirit, those who can't see any where to go, how to get back to the good times.
This is my story, my moment, and how i tried to cope.
My name? Myah, a name I'm happy with, people seem to accept it, and to be honest, my parents could have done a lot worse. I'm nineteen years old, but people tell me that sometimes, I seem older or younger, I guess that is true of everyone.
People find me unsettling sometimes and welcoming and approachable at others, I think it's my tendency to wander off into my own head from time to time, when I start to question everything, where I analyze every moment, every word, every action, searching for something more. Because there has to be something more, we can not be, as such complex beings, just put here to live and then to die.
Those moments that change your life, they can happen when and where you least expect them, which is probably why they throw people so completely. My moment came at the end of my final year of college, just eighteen and about to take my first steps into the wide world without teachers and the college support system to guide me. I was making university choices, and deciding on a degree.
Life was, dare I say it? Almost perfect. Until that moment my life had primarily revolved around classes, family and friends, I was active in student politics and was maintaining a weekend job alongside my consistently high grades. I'm not trying to boast here, just paint a picture, so you can understand. It wasn't meant to happen like it did, it shouldn't have happened.
The moment, an accident, a risk taken that had gone wrong and a careless mistake.
With school finished and two and a half months before I was due to start University my plan was to work and play hard, to make the most of my time with my friends before moving hundreds of miles away from home. A summer of sun, sand and surf, born and raised by the sea we thought nothing of getting into wetsuits and braving the cold waters of the southwest coast of England, even splashing around in bikinis from time to time.
It probably wasn't the best day for it, the surf was choppy and the sky was looking ominous in the distance, but it was the best swell we'd seen all summer and we couldn't resist the chance to catch a good wave or two, and who thinks of riptides and undercurrents when the sun is shining, and that cute guy from Psychology 1 is there with you?
Four of us went out that day, all with our boards, off we went, paddling out to where we couldn't reach the sea bed any longer, where the water was colder and darker, and the waves were higher, rougher.
For about an hour we messed around in the foam, the waves we tried to catch failed us time and time again, they broke too soon or they were too chopped up by the ever increasing wind.
"I think we should head back to shore." I remember saying at one point, while we clung to each others' boards to catch our breaths. But we didn't go back in, we all turned out to sea, watching, waiting, there would be another wave, there would be at least one good wave, there always was.
Wishful thinking?
"That one!" Someone shouted, pointing out to this blue, grey wall of water than was rising towards us, big and fast, clean and sweet.
We should have noticed the pull of the water underneath us, we should never have let go of each other, we should have looked back to shore and seen just how far we had drifted while we had been messing around.
But we didn't.
Moments, that's all it was. A few seconds where I looked at the wave, looked at the shore, looked out of the unnatural calm of the water before us. This wasn't a good plan.
"Guys.. Maybe we shouldn't..."
"Aw, don't be chicken Myah, we've ridden bigger waves before this."
"But something isn't..."
And it was too late, they were off, up on their boards and into the path of the oncoming monster and I had no choice but to follow, well, there is always a choice, but sitting where I was wouldn't have changed what had happened.
We caught that wave, we rode that blue grey monster for all of ten seconds, and those ten seconds were euphoric. Flying. That's what it feels like. Standing on a board and flying over the water, towards that yellow sand, faster and faster, controlling it without realizing you are. Magic.
Then it went wrong. That moment came, and there was nothing we could do to stop it.
The wave broke, Sooner than we had thought, harder than we had anticipated, and right over our heads.
I remember wondering what had happened as I crashed into the foaming water, as I felt my feet fall from my board, the salt water burning my eyes, rushing into my mouth and lungs as I screamed. Then there was a thud and everything went fuzzy, everything stopped hurting and I was sinking, just watching the bubbles float up towards the surface, the light fading away slowly until there was nothing except the gentle hold of the water.
Beep. Beep. Come on kid, stick with us. Beep. Beep. We're losing her! Hold on kid... Mya...
"Myah, open your eyes for me." The voice was louder and clearer than any of the other snippets I seemed to be hearing. I couldn't work out what was happening, had something bad happened? That beeping, those words, they sounded like... No, it couldn't be.
I slowly opened my eyes, blinking hard against the onslaught of light,
