SIMON
I can still remember that day.
I know I always will.
It lives in me with a terrible clarity, as if that moment split my life cleanly in two. There was the world before it, warm and whole and ordinary, and then there was the world after, cold and broken, a place I no longer recognized. In a single stroke, everything around me seemed to collapse.
My parents died that day. My father, my mother, and my uncle too. All of them were taken from me at once, and with them went the shape of the life I had known. I was only nine years old, and in the span of a few hours I became an orphan.
I had once had an aunt, but she had died years before, so there was no one left. No one from my family remained. That was the part I could never truly understand. One day I belonged to something, and the next day I was alone.
