The Accident
Okay, this one hits home quite hard: when I was 12, I and my younger brother of 6 years played knights in the garden and threw spears at a blanket with a cross on it. At one moment, I threw my spear, not knowing he stood behind the blanket. The spear went straight into his eye socket.
He survived, but the rest of the day was a blur. I remember blood everywhere, my parents yelling at me and then standing at the corner waiting for the ambulance to come while crying for what seemed a million years.
Everyone is ignoring me, then hospitals, and guilt, so much guilt… I was 12, and the nurses were giving me the evil eye.
The hardest part was still to come: my brother went blind on that eye but was unharmed otherwise (except perhaps mentally, we never spoke about it), and after about a year, he had to go to a doctor for a prosthetic eye.
My mum said, “you’re coming with us.” I remember VERY vividly sitting in the waiting room, hearing him cry, “it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.”
And when they came back after what seemed an eternity, she looked at me straight in the eye and said, “Now you know what you’ve done.”
We never spoke about it. She went alcoholic, and I became an alcoholic 10 years later. I get nightmares every few weeks, and nobody knows. I’m 47 now and still struggle. I forgave her but never forgave myself.