Perfect

Lights flashed before her eyes as she started to regain consciousness. The overwhelming sense of pain inflamed the lower half of her body and she let out a deep moan.

"Ali! Hang in there, Ali!" the voice was familiar, but she couldn't place it, the pain making it too hard to concentrate. "Please don't die! You're a fighter, Ali! Just keep fighting! Keep holding on!" A blurred face flashed before her eyes.

"It hurts," she moaned, trying to reach for her legs.

"It's going to be okay, Ali," the voice tried to comfort her, but she could hear the desperation in it.

"Please, don't let my sister die!" this was directed at someone else, not to her.

My sister... their words echoed through her head, and very slowly she realized who it was.

"Michael," she tried reaching for him, but the world continued to spin and blur around her.

"I'm right here, Ali," a hand grabbed hers and held onto it as if it never wanted to let go. She squeezed the hand tightly, willing the pain to stop but it didn't.

"I'm sorry, but you'll have to stay out here," an unfamiliar voice said and suddenly Michael's hand was slipping away from hers.

"Michael!" she cried, panicking. The pain was starting to become too much for her, and as she screamed her brother's name one last time, her vision blacked out and she saw nothing more.

~~~~~~~

"Ali! Ali! Wake up!" someone was shaking her, jolting her awake. Her eyes flew open and there was Michael, looking down at her with concern.

"Ali, are you okay?" he asked. "You were screaming my name in your sleep."

Ali let out a deep sigh of relief. It had just been a dream. She hadn't been in a car crash. She wasn't in the hospital, being rushed into emerge. Her legs weren't in immense pain. Her legs...

Won't move! she panicked, trying hard to move the limbs without success. She tore off her blankets and stared numbly at her unmoving legs.

Ali felt her heart sink in her chest. It wasn't a dream, it was a memory. A memory of the day that she had lost not only the ability to walk, but also any chance of achieving her one true dream: to be an Olympic athlete.

Ali felt tears starting to roll down her cheeks and she instinctively tried to turn her head away so that Michael wouldn't see her crying. Unfortunately, a sob escaped from her throat, alerting her brother to her sadness.

"It's going to be okay, Ali," he said, sitting down on the bed beside her and pulling her into a hug. "It's going to be okay."

"No, it's not!" Ali bawled. "Look at me! I'll never be able to swim again! All of those years of training, gone down the drain! All of my dreams, just crushed in an instant! I've lost everything!" She broke down sobbing, the tears flowing faster and heavier now.

Michael sighed. This was not the first time in the past three months that they had had this conversation. He could not even begin to imagine how his sister felt, going through what she had and feeling like she had lost everything, but he always tried his best to comfort her however he could.

"Ali, you didn't lose everything," he sighed, hugging her tightly to him. "You're still alive. The doctors said that you shouldn't have survived that crash, but yet here you are, still breathing, still holding on. You're a fighter, Ali. You always have been and always will be. I know that things seem tough and bleak right now, but things will get better, I promise."

"But everything was so perfect before!" Ali cried, tears streaming down her face. "Everything was perfect! I had the perfect dream, the perfect body-"

"You are still perfect, Ali," Michael argued, turning her to look at him. "How long is it going to take for you to realize that? Ali, you don't need to be able to walk to be perfect! You are so beautiful and I just wish that you could see that! You are perfect, Ali. Maybe you don't see that right now, but I do."

"Then what you see is a lie," she replied softly, turning away from him. Michael sighed, tired of fighting with her about this, and slowly got to his feet. He slowly walked towards the door to return to his own room across the hall, but paused by the small, vibrating phone sitting on Ali's vanity.

"It's Lily," he told her, reading the name on the screen. "You should really talk to her, you know. This hasn't been easy for her either and you shutting her out just makes it even worse." He carefully picked up the phone and tossed it onto her bed.

"Talk to her," he insisted. Ali didn't reply. With another sigh, Michael turned to leave, pausing again briefly in the doorway.

"You are perfect, Ali," he said softly over his shoulder. "I just hope that someday you'll be able to see that too." And then he was gone.

Ali remained still for a moment, waiting to make sure that he was really gone before turning her attention on the phone lying abandoned on her bed. She slowly reached for it and pulled it onto her lap. She stared down at the small device in her hands for a few minutes before she was able to summon the courage to open it. There were thirty-four new text messages and six missed calls, almost all of them from Lily.

Lily. Ali had mixed feelings when she thought about her. Lily had once been her best friend, the one person that Ali could talk to about anything, but that friendship had been shattered and Ali didn't know if they could ever go back to the way they were before.

Before my life was destroyed, she thought, half bitterly. Ali felt anger flare up inside of her and she suddenly chucked her phone across the room. It crashed into her wall and fell to the floor, surprisingly still in one piece. This upset Ali even more, because a part of her had wanted it to break into a million pieces and she suddenly found herself overwhelmed with emotions.

She turned and buried her face in her pillow, allowing the tears to flow again. Her exhaustion finally caught up with her and she ended up crying herself to sleep. This was not the first time that this had happened and it would not be the last time either.

Across the hall, lying in his own bed, Michael felt a tear of his own run down his cheek as he wished for the millionth time that Ali would finally realize just how special she was, that she didn't have to be perfect to be perfect.