The Last Seatbelt

We all have those moments in life that divide everything into two parts: before and after.

For me, it was a ten-minute drive.

It was an ordinary Thursday evening. The kind where the sky turns orange just before the sun dips below the houses, casting long shadows on the sleepy roads of our small town. My mother had asked me to come along with her to grab a few groceries. My little brother Sami, always eager to go anywhere, had jumped into the back seat without hesitation. I followed.

Our old silver hatchback was barely hanging on after all these years. The back seat had a broken seatbelt — just one functioning belt remained. My mom looked at us through the rearview mirror and said calmly, “One of you needs to wear it.”

Sami looked at me. I looked at him.

He was only six years old.

But I was fourteen, and being a teenager meant you made stupid choices with the confidence of a king.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

He nodded, trusting me, always trusting me.

---

I wish I could go back.

I wish I had tied that belt around him instead of myself.

But the thing with wishes is—they don’t work when the crash has already happened.

---

We had just crossed the bridge near the gas station when it happened.

A red truck.

Swerving. Fast. On the wrong side.

My mom screamed. I felt her slam the brakes.

Everything went silent… and then deafeningly loud.

Glass exploded.

Metal bent like paper.

The car spun, flipped.

I remember a sharp pain in my side and then—darkness.

---

I woke up two days later in a hospital bed. Tubes in my arms. My ribs broken. My left shoulder wrapped in thick bandages.

And the first thing I asked, my voice hoarse and barely audible:

“Where’s Sami?”

No one answered at first.

I asked again. And again.

Finally, my uncle came into the room, eyes red. He didn’t need to say anything.

My baby brother didn’t survive.

---

There are moments you can’t scream loud enough for. That was one of them.

I remember punching my pillow, ripping off my oxygen tube, trying to get up and falling to the floor.

I remember my mother crying from behind the curtain.

He had hit his head. Hard. The lack of a seatbelt… it was instant.

---

They let me attend the funeral in a wheelchair.

He looked like he was sleeping.

They dressed him in his favorite red shirt, the one with tiny white cars printed all over it.

I kept thinking, “He’s the one who loved seatbelts. He’s the one who always reminded me to click mine. And I took his place.”

---

After the funeral, everything changed.

My mother stopped speaking for weeks.

I stopped eating.

I refused to go back to school.

Guilt is not a weight—it’s a storm. And it tears through everything you thought you were.

I stopped being a teenager. I stopped being me.

---

Years passed. But the moment never left. It just changed form.

I studied. I worked. And I became a paramedic.

Every accident I attend now brings me back to that night.

Every time I help someone out of a car, I look at the children first.

Every time I see an unbuckled child, my hands shake a little.

I save others because I couldn’t save him.

---

One night, we arrived at the scene of a crash.

A family. Father unconscious. Mother screaming. Two kids crying in the back.

The smaller one had no seatbelt. She was bleeding from her head.

We got her out. I stayed beside her in the ambulance, holding her hand while she drifted in and out of consciousness.

She lived.

That night, I cried harder than I had in years. Not because of her pain, but because for the first time since Sami died—I felt like I had finally saved someone like him.

---

I now visit Sami’s grave every year on that same day.

I sit beside the tiny stone that has his name and a little engraved car on it. I tell him about the lives I’ve saved. I tell him about the children who walk again because I was there.

I tell him I’m sorry.

And I tell him I still hear his voice.

---

There is one sound I can never forget.

Not the crash. Not the sirens. Not the silence after.

It’s his laugh. That sweet, light laugh he had when he sang silly songs in the car.

I hear it when I drive alone at night. I hear it when I pass that same curve.

And every time I clip a child’s seatbelt in, I whisper softly,