3 Alita's flashback

Alita gave a very long sigh as she realized that there was nothing she could do as her beloved husband was already trying his best, saying more stuff would just end up giving him more stress.

Suddenly a distant memory came to her mind:

Growing up, she had never suffered from something this big before. The worst experience she had was a 6.4 magnitude earthquake during middle school. It was like a war-zone but it was nature against man. A time period where mother nature seemed to express her anger in the worst way. The earthquake caused a big disaster, she could still remember the blood-curdling screams and the heart-filled cries of parents and people as they saw their deceased loved ones. It was a disaster, from the cracked destroyed roads, the old run-down apartments that were split in two, to the falling of objects from tall buildings. That certain earthquake was the one that took the precious life of her best friend, Linda. Their school was in the central section of the city so there wasn't much space thus their main building was eight floors tall. The day it happened, it was in the morning, they had an assembly on the top roof and Linda had to talk to her teacher who was conducting the assembly so Alita had left her and went to her class on the bottom floor. All students were walking in a single file with a myriad of expressions on their faces: Some excited to get to class, some had a look of dread as they did not want to go to class, some were indifferent about it as they seemed lost in thought. It was when she got to the 3rd floor that disaster struck.

The projector suddenly shook and countless whiteboards fell. Screams and shrieks of horror flooded the ears of everyone present in the building as every student suddenly started running towards the exit. Since Alita was one of the lucky students that were on the lower floor so she easily got out of the campus. They often had security drills about this but they had never prepared for one that would be this disastrous and destructive. At the moment when the earthquake happened, Linda was in the elevator with her teacher. The whole building came down, after thirty minutes the search party arrived, Linda's body was found. She was disfigured badly: her arm was bent at an awkward angle and her head had been brutally crushed under a block of concrete that had managed to penetrate through the elevator roof. Upon sight of her best friend's body, she was hurt, terribly hurt. Linda had been with her since primary school and they were basically lifelong friends, they were there for each other. At the sight of Linda, tears flowed like water from her eyes, her soul hurt like it was living in hell. The muscles in her body felt unresponsive as she could not control herself and could only cry. That day, she cried so much that a large puddle formed around her.

She had always been an introverted girl and rarely communicated with others. It was in her second year at primary that she met Linda. Linda was a bright, beautiful and benevolent student. She quickly became friends with Alita and they cared for each other like siblings. Linda was the best memory of her life before she was a teenager. She had brought so much happiness and she herself took away so much as she left.

For the rest of high school, Alita was a very antisocial person as she would often avoid her classmates.

This personality would repeat until she went to university. In her first year at university, her professor had given her a partnered project. And this was where she met Aiden. By then Aiden was a tall, handsome guy. He was very open and caring to Alita and somehow her ice-cold heart was slowly melted down and she began opening up to him. To her, Aiden was the refugee, the shelter that she could run to. He made her feel protected and secure. She had never felt happiness like this ever since Linda had left her. He made her feel like a queen, he made her feel wanted. They both dated until the end of university and married a year after Aiden got his first job.

Another day when she felt like the world had once again accepted her was the day Mila was born. She could remember the pain, the labor, the effort. She was worried about her child as she had stayed in her womb for an unusually long period of time. But that day, when the first cries of a newborn sounded, all the pain and suffering disappeared, it was all replaced by a huge wave of happiness. Her whole body suddenly seemed to be healthy again upon sight of her daughter and all the negative thoughts on her mind had obnoxiously disappeared. It was only filled with one sole thought:

This was her and her husband's creation. This was their child. Eleven months of hardship had all paid off.

Alita's face lit up as she showed a smile, a smile that radiated her happiness, joy, and contentment. When that smile appeared, it was as if the whole room had lost its luster and it was only her and her daughter in the room.

Even though life had taken one thing that was so precious to me- it gave me even more. This world is indeed fair. Thank you to the person up there. Thank you for all you have given me in my life. Linda, I hope you're watching, this is all thanks to you. If I had never met you then fate wouldn't bring me to meet Aiden, I wouldn't have been given my little Mila. You're still looking over me from up there, aren't you?

Alita loosely looked into the far distance as she smiled as she reminisced on the past and thought "the world does indeed have weird ways of working."