Favourite and Worst - Short Narrative

PART 1 – Favourite

Charlotte’s favourite birthday will always be her 7^th birthday, as it was the birthday she got her first ever CD-player. She will always remember eagerly unwrapping the box it came in and seeing the magic music box for the first time. It was blue and silver and looked like a slightly deflated football. If you pushed the top it opened up and you could insert your CD, then there were buttons like ‘play’, ‘pause’, ‘skip forward’, ‘skip back’, and a volume knob. Charlotte kept her CD player on top of her shelf in her room and stacked her CD’s next to it. She had also received the brand new S-Club 7 CD for her birthday and it was pretty much all she played for months following her birthday.

            Charlotte had always had a love for music, since a young age whenever she heard a song she couldn’t help but try to sing along and dance. Her parents had always encouraged her appreciation for music by letting her have piano lessons, violin lessons, recorder lessons, guitar lessons, and singing lessons, however, for some reason none of these stuck for longer than about 6 months. Yet although Charlotte didn’t seem to have much interest in learning instruments she never got bored of listening to music on her CD player. It was what she did all day everyday, when doing her homework, when playing with her barbies, when making bracelets and when going to sleep. It was this first ever CD player that got Charlotte to realise listening to music was what she loved to do most in the world.

And this love stuck. Her CD player was upgraded to a walkman, that upgraded to an iPod, and that upgraded to an iPhone. Wherever Charlotte was she had her music with her. It filled her with happiness when she put those earphones in and played her favourite song, which changed about twice a week. Although Charlotte did not go into a career based around music it was still her favourite thing in the world. She would listen to music on her way to work, when writing emails, when cooking, and when chatting to friends.

PART 2 – Worst

Charlotte’s worst birthday was her 29^th birthday, as it was the birthday she lost her hearing. The day started off like any other, alarm went off at 7:00am, she got in the shower, made breakfast, ate as much breakfast as she could whilst chatting to her mum on the phone wishing her a happy birthday, put clothes on, brushed her teeth, rushed to the car, and started her usual drive to work. However, this time it wasn’t a usual drive to work. This time it was a life-changing drive that never arrived at work.

            “Budapest” by George Ezra was playing on the radio and it was her favourite song that week. She was at the traffic lights waiting for it to change to green, and then it did, and then she pulled away, and then she heard screeching, and then an extremely loud bang, and then everything went black.

When Charlotte woke up she was in hospital in an intensive care unit. It took her a while to work out what exactly had happened but slowly everything came back to her. She remembered the screeching, the bang, and the impact. She wondered how many days ago that was, if any one had been to see her, how seriously she had been injured. She wiggled her toes, twisted her ankles, kicked her legs, slowly moving up her entire body making sure everything was as it should be. As she wiggled her eyebrows Charlotte took a sigh of relief, everything seemed to be working. But something wasn’t quite right about the sigh. She did another one. Something didn’t sound right. Just as she was about to do another one she noticed that one of the nurses was watching her though her door. When the nurse realised she had been noticed she ran away, only to come back about ten seconds later, this time with a doctor following her.

The doctor opened the door and walked to towards Charlotte, she watched the door shut but didn’t hear it shut. She tried to clean her ears out with her fingers but was shortly stopped by the doctor. The doctor then continued to pull out a small whiteboard and as he started to write on it Charlotte began to realise her worst nightmare had come true. The doctor held up the whiteboard to Charlotte and though the tears pouring out her eyes she managed to make out the message: ‘Hello Charlotte, I am Doctor Reynolds, I am afraid you were in an accident and lost your hearing’.