The Day I Didn’t Die.

They found my shoes first. Side by side at the edge of the ravine, soles pointed toward the abyss like they’d been arranged on purpose. The laces were undone, dust clung to the leather, and there was no note, no blood, no trail. Just silence and the echo of a girl who’d vanished.

For two days, search teams combed the forest. Dogs barked into the underbrush, drones buzzed overhead like angry insects, and a psychic stood barefoot on a mossy rock claiming she saw me walking through water. The news said “missing.” Some said “runaway.” A few whispered “body.” But my mother never believed I was gone. “I can feel her,” she told them, unwavering. “Her heart’s still beating. She’s not done.”

She was right. I wasn’t done. Just broken.

I’d fallen twenty, maybe thirty feet. Branches snapped beneath me, but they cushioned nothing. I landed hard in the ravine, ribs shattered, one leg twisted at an angle legs aren't supposed to twist. At first, I thought I’d passed out but I hadn’t. I was awake, too awake, just paralyzed by the white hot grip of pain. I screamed, once, twice louder, until my throat burned. No one answered. It was like shouting into the void, hoping the void would care.

After a while, I stopped screaming. It felt pointless, like throwing rocks into a well and waiting for a splash that never comes. Nights were cruel. Cold seeped into my bones like wet cloth, wrapping tight and refusing to let go. I counted breaths to stay conscious, terrified that if I closed my eyes too long, I’d never open them again. I drank rainwater from leaves and stayed hungry. Hunger didn’t kill it just reminded me I was still alive. My body became a cage, locking me in with pain and panic. I started to hallucinate. My father’s voice dead three years croaked through the fog of my mind: “Get up, baby. The dark can’t keep you.”

So I moved.

Crawling was agony. Every inch forward scraped over roots, rocks, and biting ants that didn’t care I was already suffering. I used a broken branch as a crutch, dragging my ruined leg behind me, marking time by the way sunlight filtered through the trees and the fading itch of mosquito bites. Hope felt like a joke some days small, cracked, and too easily lost but I clung to it anyway, not because I believed it, but because there was nothing else to hold onto.

On the seventh day, I pushed through a thick wall of brush and saw it: a road. Smooth, real, impossibly close. I blinked, not trusting my eyes, until a car came into view, moving toward me like something from a dream. My hands trembled. I stood up barely and limped forward until my body gave out. A woman stopped. I couldn’t see her face clearly, just the shape of her against the sun, and her voice. “Oh my God, where have you come from?” she gasped. I felt her jacket wrap around me soft, warm, smelling of soap and perfume and I whispered the only word I could manage: “Home.”

Back in town, I was a wraith. Barefoot. Bloody. Ghost-pale. People stared. They didn’t know what to say. But my mother she didn’t stare. She ran. She dropped to her knees, grabbed my face like it might vanish. She didn’t cry. Just pressed her forehead to mine and whispered, “You’re fire. You were never meant to drown.”

And somehow, that was enough.

Now when people ask me how I survived, I don’t say strength. I say rage. I say ghosts. I say the stubborn rhythm of my breath refusing to stop. I say the scream that went unanswered and the road that waited. I didn’t die. But I shed something in those woods. Something soft. Something that once believed life would always be gentle. What’s left is sharper. Quieter. Still healing but alive.