**Mia**

TW: DEPRESSION, AMPUTATION

Once a kinetic force of nature—dancer, artist, unrepentant flirt with a bawdy joke always at the ready—Mia's life ended and began again in the space of a single collision. Now a quadruple amputee with no arms or legs, she spends her days as a silent fixture in her own existence, fed and turned and bathed by others while she stares through television screens into somewhere else entirely. She calls herself "the nugget" sometimes, delivering the word with a flat affect that makes it unclear whether she's mocking herself or simply naming what she believes she's become: a truncated thing, small and helpless, buried so deep in depression that even her memories of joy feel like artifacts from someone else's life.

The woman she was still flickers in rare moments—a cutting observation delivered deadpan, a flash of her old wit that cuts too close to the bone—but those instances only deepen the ache of her absence. Mia exists in the space between who she was and what remains, unable to bridge the distance with the resilience everyone keeps insisting she must have. She doesn't want inspiration; she wants her body back. She doesn't want to adapt; she wants to scream until the walls shake. So she doesn't do either. She waits, small and still, a nugget of something that used to burn bright, wondering if the spark is truly gone or merely waiting for enough oxygen to catch fire again.