01

"I'm just saying, Suzy. My mother always told me that the only things you really need for a suitcase are clean panties and toothbrush.” I counted in a mild voice, although my lips betrayed me by bowing a little higher. "I think it has something to do with being things you shouldn't borrow, unless you don't care about bacterium, you know?"

I could easily imagine Suzane Johnson writhing in a strange laugh when listening to this, simply by hearing the little pig snoring she let out when she got excited about one of my worst jokes.

It was strange not to be able to return the same intensity of animation, although just so that she could not understand anything, I tried hard, and imitated a rehearsed sound of what was once an ironic laugh.

I've never been the kind of person who struggled to be funny. I've never had much talent to be the silly court of a circle of friends. But I had a certain reputation for being the one who never let herself be shaken by the misfortunes of life.

I always had a joke on the tip of my tongue to make someone forget about their problems for a few seconds. Suzane Johnson was the one who knew my arsenal of dirty and stupid jokes the most. And he was, consequently, the person who laughed the most about all of them.

Penelope Maxwell was almost like a brand of a person who was never shaken by anything. A woman in her twenties who had dedicated herself to a life of carefully calculated promiscuities, a very long list of broken hearts, and dreams that went far beyond buying a house and putting a husband and children in it.

But this same Penelope Maxwell came into conflict with that Penelope I met looking in the mirror.

It had been a year since an accident that stole everything I had most arrested in my life; my freedom.

I was run over one night when I was leaving a bar, after fighting with Suzane about our past problems. It was like being punished instantly by Karma. I didn't even say what I really thought was bad about my best friend, or how selfish and icy I thought she was, when a car shot at me and I only remember the pain of the first impact.

The days at the hospital were chaotic. I had serious fractures. I almost died more than once. I had to receive blood transfusions. I had to relearn how to breathe, and even with all the effort of the doctors, my lungs still remained very affected by what happened, so I ended up having to adapt to a life similar to asthmatics.

Today I have to use a firecracker, and sometimes even oxygen cylinders, because my chest seems to the point of tearing due to the pain of burning due to shortness of breath. I also had to learn to walk, because I spent a lot of time in a wheelchair, trying to make my body remember the most basic movements of human daily life.

I had to learn how to deal with depression and the side effects that strong antibiotics and anxiolytics caused me. My teeth were always white, they had to be more carefully accompanied by a dentist. My golden brown hair lost that shine that always made my tanned skin tone even more vivid. And my dark eyes reached a point of opacity that almost couldn't always be said that there was life in my body. The two dark ones lasted longer than expected. Because everyone considered me too good to let me be shaken by the problems. But it wasn't just because of the accident. It was not just for the slow recovery and the effects that almost no one mentions when making a continuous use of medicines. It was because of the weight that was thrown on my shoulders overnight.

I was constantly harassed by the press. And don't think that's a reason for me to brag. Unwanted fame only came because of a very complicated and terrible issue. Things that involved the reasons for my friendship with Suzane to be shaken, and the worst of our pasts mixing. And, as if that wasn't enough, there was also the police. The duty of those men should be to protect any good citizen who needed your help. But I didn't include myself on this list. I was removed from the benefit of receiving help on the day my family provided the greatest political chaos in the whole world. Even though it's not my fault. I had to accept the burden of not being the person who, at any sign of a problem, would call the police. It was a nightmare to imagine that they could surround the door of my head at the first sign that I could do something against other people.

But the person Penelope Maxwell was, the one everyone knew, could easily deal with those obstacles. Penelope Maxwell, the one who never had an hour to return after leaving home in the company of women and alcohol, was able to totally ignore the police vehicles that surrounded every corner near her house.

Penelope Maxwell, the one who did not care about what would become of her life in the future, would very possibly deal better with the expressions of fear and the conspiratorial comments she heard from her neighbors when trying to take a walk on the street.

But the Penelope Maxwell I became was not able to do that. And the image that stared at me in the mirror of the closet in my room, revealed to me a woman in wide and ordinary clothes, and eyes disturbingly stained by deep dark circles.

The Penelope who stared at me in the mirror was the one who had a firecracker and an oxygen cylinder always prepared for a moment of crisis. She had a closed wheelchair leaning next to the wooden cabinet. There was a list on top of the nightstand with the right times for each medicine I had to take.

And that Penelope periodically consulted with physiotherapists to try to get back to her normal. Even though she knew that normal would never fit that body full of scars and brittle by what happened in the past.

I knew I had to get rid of that idea of trying to go back to what I was. But it was painful to see the difference, because not everyone could notice it.

Because above all the pains and consequences of that accident, there was the lack of hope, sadness, mourning for a life that would have been beautiful. And that kind of thing didn't heal with medicine or adhesives. It took a much greater willpower to deal with that scratchy feeling inside the chest.

And I've never been preparing for that. I never imagined that my life would change that way. But I was just a human. And I broke as easily as it is not expected to be possible.