We’d been together for three years when it happened.

Seventeen. Young, stupid, invincible—or so I thought. The night of the crash plays in my head more often than I care to admit. One moment, laughter in the car. The next, twisted metal, screaming tires, and a silence so loud it drowned everything else out.

The next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital bed. Cold. Heavy. And then the silence that came after the doctor said the words I still hate hearing: spinal cord injury. Paralysed from the waist down.

But more than that, I remember you.

You never flinched. Never left.

You held my hand even when I couldn’t look you in the eye. When I was drowning in shame, grief, rage—you were just there.

“You should go home,” I rasped, barely able to get the words out through the fog of pain and medication.

You looked up at me with red eyes and shook your head. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And you didn’t.

Not when I screamed in frustration during physical therapy. Not when I lashed out, humiliated that I needed help just to use the bathroom. Not when I shut down and stopped talking for days at a time. You were there through every damn moment. Learning alongside me—how to fold up my chair to fit it into the back of your car, how to navigate sidewalks with no ramps, how to help me dress wounds I wouldn’t even look at.

Some nights I hated myself more than I could explain. “You didn’t sign up for this,” I’d whisper into the dark.

But you always answered. “I signed up for you.”

Four years passed.

And you never left.

Now we’re twenty-one. At university, somehow. I never thought I’d get here, not with all the setbacks, all the staring, all the whispers behind my back. But here we are. Campus is mostly accessible. Mostly. I still get stuck in the grass sometimes or find a building without an elevator that should have one.

You looks at me sometimes—like during lectures when you think I’m not paying attention—and I see it in your eyes. That same stubborn fire you had when we were seventeen. The same person who stayed. The same person who saved me.

I don't say it enough, but I think it every day:

I wouldn’t have made it without you.

Hell, I wouldn’t even be me without you.