I remember my first day. My first day of what? Of existing, of course. Not the day of my actual birth, no one recalls their own birth. Can you imagine what a tragic shock that would be. There was screaming, blood, and a close up of the inside of a vagina. But that is just nonsense to recall such a thing and those who claim to are huge liars. Well, I think they are and if I think they are huge liars than, for the purpose of this narrative, they are. Play along with me, dear readers, you will find out what I like and don. Newborn memory! A newborn’s brain doesn’t process sounds, lights, well, anything. They even have absolute crap vision for months. Basically newborns world reality is pretty much a really fucked up acid trip and you wonder why they cry and shit themselves? Now, where was I? Ah, yes. My first day. I was cold and people were talking and it seemed to me that my entire head had been crushed. I had been in an horrific Tobogganing accident, you see. My nine year old body had been flung forward off a sled into a giant boulder, bounced back into another and was propelled forward where my teeth met another tobogganer’s skull, two of them deciding to remain there. Note to everyone: don’t go sledding in a gravel pit. I was nine years old. My jaw broken in three places, two ruptured discs in my lower spine, a four inch bash across my jaw, teeth broken and missing, a skull cracked in the back. My brain had been violently whipped back and forth. I doubt very much that any of my memories from the sledding hill are real. My brain put them there, no doubt in a frantic search for something familiar. Anything familiar.
We had been living in a small northern mining town, the hospital I woke in was almost three hundred miles from home. Home. I guess it didn’t matter that I was so far from home because I had no idea what home was.
It was Christmas, 1980. The paediatric ward had donated Christmas toys. Half broken, old, neglected toys, I can remember the smell of the ward. I remember a woman visiting, the elementary school secretary had taken a visit to the city to Christmas shop and she stopped in with her teenage daughter. Our town was small. Two elementary schools, one high school. The town a product of various mining companies. Everyone knew everyone and a nine year old in such a bad accident was certainly a minor celebrity. I must have been for the school secretary and her daughter to stop in and see me. They brought me a raggedy Ann and Andy snow globe except it wasn’t a globe, it was more of a rectangle but I loved it and when it began to leak and all of the “snow” just sat on the bottom, I was in my 20s and it felt like a struggle for me to part with it. I guess because it was the first gift I remember.
To this day, I have no memories from before the accident. Not who anyone was, where I lived, my family. Nothing. When I tell this story to people now, many often ask if I have tried hypnosis but really? How important are those memories anyway?
My mum said I was happier before that accident, she tells me how much she misses the little girl I used to be and how she wishes she could have her back. I think that is a really fucked up thing to say to your kid.
But that is how I began. With 22 stitches in my face, my jaw wired, two teeth gone, five others smashed and painfully sharp, cutting my tongue. My peripheral vision gone, my auditory memory significantly damaged - worse so because this loss went in-noticed for many years and seriously impaired by relationships.
There were other remnant wounds. This was the first time I kissed death and it loved the taste of my lips.

YA literature? You mean books about Super Special White Girl and Her Mysterious Brooding Boyfriend?