For this month’s flash essay contest, we asked you over at Narratively Academy to describe an unexpected comeback from a tragedy. And wow, even with a small turnaround window — we shared the contest Tuesday morning and it was due Wednesday EOD — we got so many great responses! It’s always such a thrill to see when a prompt resonates with people, and of course, the essays that often inspire them, which in this case was the excerpt we recently published from Amy Gabrielle’s memoir, “Widow in the City.” This one is touching and inspirational — enjoy! Illustration by Micky Walls/Narratively archiveThe scar hid beneath my hair like a secret no one could see. But I felt it every morning when I touched the uneven ridge running from the base of my skull up to my ear, tracing the place where surgeons opened my head and changed the geography of my life forever.The doctors never promised certainty. Survival itself, at less than 30 percent, had felt conditional, fragile as breath on glass. For weeks afterward, I moved through my days in a strange fog, exhausted by light, noise, conversation, even memory. Sometimes I stood in the kitchen, unable to remember why I had walked there. Sometimes fear arrived without warning, cold and metallic.Before the surgery, I had loved writing. But afterward, language frightened me. Words no longer came easily. Sentences scattered before I could hold them still. I began to wonder whether the woman I had been before the operating room still existed somewhere inside me, or whether she had been left behind beneath the fluorescent lights and anesthesia.One afternoon, months later, I sat alone at the dining room table as rain tapped softly against my tall windows. A yellow legal pad lay untouched before me. I stared at it for a long time.Then, without planning to, I wrote a single sentence.Memories are like perennial flowers.It was not brilliant. I cannot even remember why those words came to me first. But I remember what it felt like to see that line appear beneath my hand.Alive.Something inside me stirred awake in that moment. Not the body the surgeons repaired. Something deeper. A voice I thought I had lost forever.That first sentence became a doorway back to myself. And without realizing it then, I had already begun my comeback.PS: Make sure you don’t miss any of our flash essay contests and calls for pitches by subscribing to Narratively Academy, our community for writers and authors.Etya Vaserman Krichmar was born Jewish in the Soviet Union, where antisemitism shaped the landscape of her childhood, before she found voice and freedom in the U.S.