tangled up in blue

01

AN- as of august 2021, I've edited this chapter quite a bit- the only main detail that's changed is noah is now eighteen for the whole book, so apologies to first time readers for the inconsistencies! i'm gonna change it as I go along <3

Noah, 4 weeks later

I woke up.

Then, I immediately wished I hadn't.

The last time I was alive, it was still spring. The world was pink and white and everything was beginning. But apparently, things change when you go into a coma. As you sleep, you forget that time doesn't stop for anyone else. Just you. And then you wake up, and the clock is still ticking, and you're suddenly eighteen and your Mom is dead and your Dad needs a machine to breathe.

I spent four weeks in a coma. The old me would've thought that was terrifying, but apparently trauma changes how you think about things, because someone could've punched me in the face and I probably would've moved on pretty quickly. The new me also wasn't too bothered about missing my birthday and my high school graduation. Lee, my best friend, said it was probably a good thing I didn't have to watch kids who couldn't care less about me sob hysterically when they found out what I'd been through. By the sounds of it, I thoroughly agreed with him.

I decided to take the fear and horror of what had happened to me a month ago and put it in a jar, stored deep within the confines of my mind. My nurse called it 'the art of healing' when I guilt-tripped her into giving me more morphine. Y'know, learning to let go and all that Eat, Pray, Love bullshit. I called it the art of pretending to be okay. The art of being Noah Quinn. So, in conclusion, apart from living in a hospital gown that completely exposed my ass and listening to my ward roommate blast Fix You every day for my week's recovery until I wanted to violently murder Chris Martin, things were pretty normal. Well. Except for the fact that I almost died.

It was summer. The world was yellow and blue. I was leaving the hospital behind, along with the man who raised me. He wasn't dead, but I still couldn't look at him, not with all those tubes coming out of his body. An undead robot that I called Dad.

When the doctors had pulled my own tube from my throat, they told me that our car had crashed into a lake, as my Dad swerved to avoid a drunk driver on a tight bend. There were lots of tight, cliffside roads in Napa Valley, so driving headfirst into a concrete wall of water was an easy mistake to make; a simple, stupid accident. It could have been anyone. It should have been anyone.

But I knew one thing the doctors didn't. We'd been arguing that night about something as irrelevant as the radio station, something that covered up our true, unspoken battle with meaningless words and wasted time. There was a language barrier between my Dad and me. My older sister couldn't understand, and I couldn't forgive; but I guess that's what families are made of, aren't they? Language barriers and misunderstandings and whatever the opposite of forgiveness is.

"He looks better. Don't you think?" Katherine had asked me a couple of days after I woke up.

I sifted the golden brown strands of her long, straight hair through my weak fingers, so different to my own dark waves. Her eyes were the color chocolate turns when it melts. Mine were the color of water when it goes on forever.

"Better than yesterday, or better 'cause the last time you spoke to him he was drunk?"

Kath's eyes narrowed at my harsh tone. "Don't, Noah. He's been sober ever since I left for college. We can't blame him for how he tried to cope with... with what happened. You were just a kid then. You couldn't have understood." I scoffed, and she sighed. "I'm sorry. Just, please. Visit him for me. We need all the family we can get."