Rebirth12 min read
I Woke Up in 2001 and Decided Not to Die Again
ButterPicks10 views
"I can't breathe." I, Bella Sun, said it out loud before I really understood where I was.
"Hey, get up. This is not a place to sleep," an old woman snapped, spitting a few angry syllables at me.
I blinked into bright sun and smelled vegetables and frying oil. My hand slipped on a cold brick. My last memories were white lights and a wet hospital room and a man named Phoenix Delgado standing over me, smiling like a judge.
"Who are you?" the old man with a red armband barked.
"I'm—" I swallowed. My voice sounded small and strange in my own ears. "I'm fine."
They didn't believe me. They thought I was drunk or sick. They called me "girl" like I was a street child. The market around me had banners I remembered as relics. I checked a vendor's calendar. The year stared at me: 2001.
I laughed once, a hard, broken sound. "I'm back," I told nobody in particular. "I'm back in 2001."
I sat up and let the world rush in. The metal taste in my mouth was not blood. It was fear and a strange, fierce relief. I had died while losing a baby. I had died with Phoenix Delgado's name carved into my chest by the memory of his last cold words. I had sworn, with every breath I couldn't keep, that if I could go back, I would change everything.
I found the address with the map inside my skull like a scar. I walked for an hour until the city shifted into the gray, weed-filled yard of a house I knew too well. The villa at Number One Quing Road—this would one day be a prison for me. Now it was shabby and half-broken.
"Who goes there?" a woman in white asked, stepping out with high heels that made her sound like knives.
"Are you the short-term helper they've hired?" she said, and her face was a brand of cold I recognized. Harriet Christensen. The woman who would become Phoenix's mother. The woman I had learned to fear.
"Yes," I lied. My chest hurt with the old anger and the new plan.
She shrugged like she had tossed me into a trash bin.
"Once a week. Look in on him. See if he is alive," she said and walked away.
"You mean 'only once a week'?" I shouted after her, and felt the grin start in my mouth. "Fine. Once a week is enough. For now."
I creeped inside and found him under the dining table, skinny and small and curled up around a wooden leg like he was hiding from his shadow.
"Out," I said, heavy and foolish with a plan.
He didn't move. He held the table leg like it would keep him safe.
I hit the light switch and made him blink into the glare. He smelled of dust and something sour. When I tugged, he clutched the table leg harder.
"Get out," I ordered.
A small voice said, "No."
I laughed, but my laugh slid into something softer. "You're eight," I said to him. "You're not even eight."
He blinked at me with an expression I had seen hundreds of times on a camera screen: cool and closed, a wound hidden behind dark eyes.
I hauled him out with both hands. He slapped the wall on the way and did not cry. I stared at the bruises and the long, angry marks across his back. The child had been whipped until the skin was red and raw.
"Who did this?" I asked.
He flinched and then turned his face away like a stone.
"Come." I brought him to the kitchen. "Sit."
He stared at the medicine box like it was an animal. I scrubbed the wounds. He held still like a statue. Every touch was a promise I hadn't planned to keep.
"Eat," I said later, setting a bowl of tomato and egg noodles down in front of him. I wanted to hum, to make it normal and safe.
He said, small, "I'm hungry."
"Then eat loud," I said and slurped. "Make a show of it. Nothing beats a man who slurps noodles."
He looked at me, offended and curious all at once. I stuck my face near his and slurped harder until I choked.
He cracked a tiny smile. "You're loud," he said.
"Good," I said. "Be loud. You deserve loud."
I wrote my plan on the inside of my head like a list.
I will not let my older death happen again.
I will not be trapped by a handsome monster.
I will find the roots of his cruelty and pull them out.
I will make him kind.
I will find the man who will love me for being alive, not for owning me.
Days became training. I told myself to be careful. I also found how much power an eight-year-old boy's trust gave me.
"Why do you let her hit you?" I asked one day after sitting with him while he counted coins.
He looked at me like I had asked the sky to change color. "She says I am a mistake," he whispered.
"She says wrong things," I said. "She is wrong."
"She says you are not my mother," he offered. "She says you are temporary."
"Temporary is fine," I told him. "Temporary can become forever if we pretend long enough."
I stayed. I cooked. I kept little promises that turned into habits. I sewed a sunflowers patch onto a shirt and watched him look at it like it might burn him.
"Promise me one thing," he said once, in the dark, when he had a fever and my hand was cool against his forehead.
"What?" I asked.
"Don't leave when I'm small," he said. "Don't leave when I'm big."
I pressed my lips to his hair. "I won't," I said.
I lied then and told the truth later in other ways.
I learned how the house bent around Harriet. Walls were full of nods and silences. There were people who answered to Harriet: Boden Cardenas, who was efficient and mostly kind, and Salvador Boyd, the old man who cast long looks at the boy and then folded them away. Harriet's face was a blade; her voice was a command.
I went to Salvador once with the evidence on my phone—photos I took with hands that shook and a voice that did not.
"She hits him," I said bluntly in the old man's study as rain tapped the glass.
Salvador looked at my small pictures, at the red marks. He put the glasses down and his face crumbled a little.
"Harriet?" he said. He said it like somebody asked the name of a crooked coin. "She would do this?"
"Yes." I did not flirt with civility. "Your grandson needs you. Let me help."
Salvador's voice was a sand-cat's purr. "You have looked after him."
"I have," I said.
He called for Boden and for a lawyer. He called for rules. Harriet returned from the market with perfume and a smile and found the house in order, the yard neat, the boy clean and fed. Her face went pale before she even walked in. She had never expected to be challenged.
"You think you can give orders in my house?" she hissed at me later, alone in the drawing room.
"I think you are tired. I think you need to rest," I told her. "I also think you would like your name to still mean something when people talk about you. If you continue like this, that name will rot."
Her eyes burst open. "You—"
"Your husband died," I said plainly. "The power you have is a house and a man dead." I kept my voice normal. "You need something else. Try love. Try one natural smile. Try hearing your grandson laugh."
She laughed and the laugh was sour. "You think you can lecture me?"
"Yes," I said. "Because I have been lectured all my life by people who never had to be honest. I know the truth when I see it."
Her fury was loud. She told me I was temporary and that she would call the police. She did neither. She moved like someone with a plan, and then she misread the room. Salvador sat with Boden and told them the house would have rules. Harriet would have to follow them or lose the respect of the men who gave her name power. She had never expected elders to matter more than her.
"How will you stop her?" she asked, later, when I stood in the nursery where the moonlight fell on his hair.
"I will show him a different world," I answered. "I will teach him how to be kinder than what hurt him."
"You will fail," she said, flat.
"Maybe," I whispered, "but I died once for trying to be loud. I will try again."
Years stitched themselves slowly around us. I taught him to make sunflowers from paper. I taught him to feed fish and to count the colors of morning. I taught him addition and anger control and, most of all, how to speak when he was wronged.
"How do I say 'I am not a mistake'?" he asked when he was ten.
"You say, 'I am here,'" I said. "Say it loud. Say it like air."
He said it once. Then he said it twice. Then one afternoon he said it like a bell.
When he was a child, people called him black-faced and small. When he played soccer with the other boys, his feet were quick and mean and kind all at once. I watched him from the fence like a proud, dangerous mother.
"Why are you teaching me numbers?" he asked as he kicked a ball and missed.
"So you can plan," I said. "So you can count the people who lie to you and know exactly how much it costs them."
He smiled then, crooked and honest. "You are mean," he said.
"I'm practical," I answered.
I kept proving to him we were on the same team. I defended him in the courtyard when other children turned mean. I went to the school and became, by accident, a substitute. I found that I could stand in front of a room and hold thirty-seven small bodies with little more than my voice and the way I moved. I said numbers and rules and made them into games. The students loved the voice that laughed at mistakes.
"You're not my mother," he told me one winter day, later than his fever and earlier than his first real laugh.
"No," I said. "I'm not your mother. I'm a woman who stayed."
He grew into a boy who read fast and did not gossip. He learned kindness like a new language and began to speak it without thinking. Everything I nudged into his head sprouted.
At twelve there was trouble. He hit another boy who had spat at him. I stood two feet away. I called his name.
"Why?" I asked low.
"He called me by my wrong name," he said. "He said my mother is a witch."
"Names stick because people say them," I told him. "Don't let them throw stones."
I wrote to Salvador and Boden. I told them about the teachers who wanted to push him out. They came to school, and the world shifted. Boden's hands were steady and firm. Salvador's eyes held a weight of decisions. Together they told the school to stop bullying him.
"You will hear more," Boden warned me once with a soft voice. "People do not like change."
"We will change him anyway," I said.
I watched a slow, stubborn bloom. He learned to laugh in the yard with the girls who used to call him ugly. He learned to bring me back strange scraps of things he found: a smooth stone, a page torn from a comic. He learned to protect the small things with a fierceness that frightened me in a way I did not expect. I taught him why to protect, not to break.
When he was fifteen he came to me and said, "I like you."
"Like what?" I asked, and he turned red and then pale and then angry and then honest.
"I like you. Like like," he said.
"That's a problem," I said, laughing once too sharp. "I'm older. You will be older. You will be powerful. There are rules."
"Rules can be changed," he said, and his small hand found my wrist like it was a lifeline.
Years shortened into a new shape. He became a teenager, then a young man with shoulders that began to look like a promise. I was still teaching. I still made noodles. I still planted sunflowers because I liked the way they faced the sun.
I also watched my future self like a ghost. Every choice I made was a line in a new map. I wanted to make sure that when he became the man who had hurt me—if he ever did—he would not hurt anyone again. I wanted to be free of the memory that had killed me.
"Why do you keep me?" he asked one evening when we watched the light die over the garden.
"Because you were a child who needed someone," I said. "Because I'm stubborn."
"Because you are a cow," he said.
"Because I am human." I smiled. "Because you are my project."
He smiled back, a little crooked, and kissed my hand by accident. I did not stop him. I did not push him away. Time had changed the lines between us.
When he turned twenty-five, life got dangerous again. Harriet's influence reached outward like a rot. She wanted more control of the family company Salvador had left to the trust. She wanted to keep her power and her lies. She started to use money and rumour like knives. I hated her then in a way that was colder than the first anger because now she could hurt many people, not just one child.
One night there was a party at the company to celebrate a donation to the city—Salvador had insisted the money go to the school. Harriet stood on a stage and gave a speech with honey and poison. I slipped into the crowd, carried a wallet of photos and messages and the evidence of abuse Harriet had tried to hide.
I met Boden in a back hallway. "Are you sure?" he whispered.
"Yes," I said. "Watch my back."
On the stage, Harriet took a bow. The crowd clapped. Men in suits smiled around her.
I walked up the side stairs and stood behind the microphone while they changed the music.
"Excuse me," I said. It was a small voice, less than a microphone deserves.
The music stopped.
"Who is she?" Harriet asked, loud and angry.
"She is nothing," someone joked.
"She used to be nothing," I said, and then I began to speak about the boy I had found under a table. I told them about the red marks, the nights of fever, the small meals eaten loudly in the dark. I told them I had evidence and a camera and a woman who claimed she had a right to break a child.
The first gasp was like a small wave. Then men looked at one another. They turned toward Salvador. He did not stand at first. He took the photos I handed him. He looked at Harriet the way a judge looks at a long-time criminal. He expected excuses and found nothing but silence.
"Is this true?" he asked, and Harriet could not answer.
She lost the room. People choose sides quickly.
"You knew," Boden said into a reporter tape, and it felt like thunder. "You saw and you chose to do nothing."
Harriet's face had the color of toast left too long. She stammered and tried to laugh and to say she was misunderstood. The room smelled suddenly like a trap closing. Men whose gifts once warmed her smiled like they had swallowed gravel. The company board met the next day. Harriet had to sign a paper that kept her away from the child. She did not lose everything, but she lost what she wanted most: the peace of being unquestioned.
He stood by me on the terrace with the city at our feet. He was not yet perfect. He had made choices. He had his own scars. But the boy who used to hide under tables turned into a man who stood in the sunlight and took responsibility.
"You did this," Phoenix Delgado told me that night, voice thin with an emotion I could not name.
"I only told the truth," I said.
"You put yourself at risk."
"I would do it again," I said.
He took my hand. He was big then. He was strong in the way I needed him to be. He was careful with me. He did not try to own me. He kept his voice soft when he spoke about things that might have once been violent. He had learned to be kind from the woman no one expected him to have.
"Will you let me be better?" he asked.
"I already did," I said. "You let yourself be taught."
We built new things on old dirt. The sunflowers I planted grew taller every summer. He learned to bring me coffee in the morning without sarcasm. He learned to ask and to mean it. He learned to listen.
When the child of our future came—years later in a life that tasted like a second chance—I was in a small bright room that smelled like lemon soap. I had learned how to birth without fear because the people who mattered sat at my bedside. Phoenix squeezed my hand like metal.
"Don't leave," he said, the old eight-year-old words returned like a prayer.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said.
He watched the doctor and the nurses and he watched me. He did not let Harriet inside the hospital near the delivery room. Salvador stood like a pillar outside the door. Boden sat on a chair with his jacket folded across his knees like a soldier.
"They will not take her," Phoenix said, voice low.
"You don't get to be scary again," I told him. "You get to be a man."
He smiled and the smile broke something open in me.
"Who named her?" he asked when the small cry finally stopped and a wet, small thing was placed on my chest.
"I don't know yet," I said, and the baby tangled fingers into my thumb with a grip that belonged to every child who would survive.
"Then I will," he said. "I will pick something that grows toward the sun."
We planted a sunflower in the yard that afternoon. The baby slept against my chest in a small blanket. The garden looked like a promise.
"What's her name?" Phoenix asked.
I looked at the seedling, at the yellow promise, then down at the child's hair.
"Keep her safe," I said.
He laughed then, rough with joy. "I will. I will keep you both safe."
My ending did not come with a cold white light. There were scars—both of us carried them. Sometimes I stung at the memory of the old life, of white tiles and a man who smiled like a judge. Sometimes I felt guilty for the nights he had been cruel and how long it had taken him to learn kindness. I forgave and I never forgave. I built boundaries like fences. Love grew inside them.
Years later, when my little girl was four and refused to nap, she would drag me to the garden and bend my finger around a sunflower seed.
"Plant it," she would say, serious like the world had taught her only good things.
I put the seed in her fist. "Make a wish."
She closed her small fingers and whispered to it as if the seed was a secret. Phoenix knelt beside her and helped her bury it.
"Tell me your wish," he said.
She looked up shyly. "I wish we never die like before."
Phoenix's hands were warm on her shoulders. He looked at me and I saw the long mirror of all we had done.
"We didn't," he said. "We changed the story."
I smiled and leaned against him in the garden of our new life. The sunflowers nodded as if they knew the truth. I had been born twice. The second time, I chose.
"Will you keep teaching him?" he asked, voice soft as dirt.
"Yes," I said. "And you will keep learning."
He kissed my temple. The wind smelled like lemon soap and old rain.
"Promise?" he asked.
"Promise," I said.
She put two sticky hands on his face and pulled him down for a squeeze. He laughed and let her.
"I used to die once," I said, later, alone in the garden at dusk.
"Not anymore," he answered from behind me. "Because you decided not to."
I pressed my forehead into his back and listened to the steady beat of a man who had become my safe place, not my judge.
"Good," I whispered.
We watched the sunflowers grow taller than a child, taller than a man. The seeds we planted that first spring had taken root. I had planted a life with my own hands.
The new ending was mine.
The End
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