The scars weren’t there when she was 21.

That spattering of pinched skin from her left shoulder to her ankle. some like marks from cigarettes, some like bullet wounds, some like exactly what they were; 3rd degree burns. A map of small, sudden violences.

She’d just graduated from university. In Colombia, after receiving your degree, you’re required to spend one year in a town or community in the country, doing volunteer work of one kind or another. A great idea. An even better one if the country weren’t in it’s fifth decade of civil war…a war so long and tired that no one involved, if asked why it’s still on, would be able to come up with any kind of a convincing answer.

She was assigned to a small community a few hours northeast of medellín called el apartado. I’m not sure what it was she was doing there as a volunteer. We didn’t really talk about that. From the look in her eyes as she talked about that time, though, it seemed like the experience was a great one. She was young, beautiful, intelligent, and curious. She was just jotting down the first few words of her adult life.

Some friends from Bogotá came out to visit her, including her boyfriend of 4 years. They went to a local nightclub to dance and celebrate their friendship. A Normal start to a normal night.

I sat for a long time after she’d told me what happened at the night club, thinking about what it must have been like, that night. trying to fill in the spaces, trying to picture the muggy tropical air, the lights and lamps of a small town at night, everyone dressed to the nines. The sound of salsa and reggaetón blasting from cheap speakers, local men leaning against walls with beers in their hands, their clean shirts tucked in, watching a group of laughing Rolos (kids from bogotá) stroll by, their eyes lingering on that one petite girl, the one with all that energy, the one so intensely unaware of her youthful beauty.

They entered the club as a group, bought drinks, danced, talked, peoplewatched, whatever it is you do in that pulsing dark and light, the hypersensory world of sound, skin and movement. “I was having such a great time.” she told me. “I mean, my friends were visiting, we were dancing like crazy. I remember looking at them and smiling just because they were with me.”

I only saw her eyes mist up twice during the whole story. I think I would cry harder with every telling, if it were me. Maybe she used to. Maybe time’s done its work, softened things a bit, carried her a bit further away from the immediacy of it all.

She didn’t see the man. She didn’t see him throw the homemade grenade into the middle of the crowd, just a couple meters from where she was dancing, caught up in the music, and she didn’t hear or feel the explosion. OUT. BLACK. NOTHING.

She woke up. “I was so disoriented. I couldn’t figure out where I was, why I was on the floor, where that floor was, why my left side was wet and slippery. And then men came over and reached for me and I remember yelling and kicking at them, telling them to get away, screaming at them ‘who bled on me! who’s blood is this?!?’”

They carried her out. Hundreds of people stood outside, straining to get a look at her. They put her in an ambulance with seven other bleeding, burned people. It really didn’t register. She still couldn’t figure out what was going on, and why there was so much commotion, sirens, lights, and screaming. They got to the hospital and put her in a wheelchair. A few of her friends were there, asking her how she was. She asked them what had happened “Was it an oven that exploded? ” she wondered. “No” they said, “it was a bomb, andrea. Someone threw a bomb into the nightclub.”

The medics began to cut away her clothing with a pair of scissors. She looked down at herself. “estoy negra, parezco un carboncito” (I’m black, I look like a little lump of coal) she thought to herself before she passed out.

The next few days were pain. That was existence; constant, screaming pain. The small town’s hospital couldn’t deal with nearly all of the 160 injured victims, especially the critically wounded ones. Andrea and a handful of others were flown by US Embassy helicopters to Medellín. They had her heavily sedated because of her many 3rd degree burns, but it didn’t really help, it just suggested the concept of less pain. They opened up her abdomen to remove the shrapnel that had perforated her small intestine. They removed other bits of metal from her left side, they washed the burned skin away, scrubbed out the dirt and grit from the seeping pink flesh, they monitored her imploded eardrums, they took the shrapnel out of her right eye, put in a plastic lens to replace the one that had ruptured from the concussion of the explosion.

she faded in and out of a hazy reality and pain-drug-fantasy. “I only had one dream. Over and over.” she said “I was a tiny doll in this huge doll factory. I would roll down the assembly line and workers would be shoving limbs onto my body and then further down the line they would rip them out again and I would just go around and around like that being put together and ripped apart.”

She would also call out for her best friend Javier nearly every night. “It was strange” she told me “I didn’t ask about anyone else, I just felt that something was wrong, really wrong with Javi” Her family, friends, and the medical staff deflected her questions regarding her friend saying, “he’s too ill to communicate right now, just give it time.” But something kept nagging at her and she persisted until one day she looked at her mom after yet another deflection and said “He’s dead isn’t he?”

“yes”.

Weeping. Silence. Pain of a new kind.

The painkillers intensified her nightmares of the doll factory. The doctors said that the only thing they could do was to try to continue the treatment on her burns without anesthetic. They warned her that the pain would be absolutely excruciating. She told them to bring it on. “I felt like I was offering up my pain to the memory of Javier, that by feeling life so intensely I would honor his death.”

Days folded into weeks which gelled into months. wounds were healing, skin was grafted onto her worst burns. She started rehab “…which was almost worse than having my burns cleaned.” she laughed.

She saw the left side of her body for the first time. “No one will ever want me, now” she mourned, the scars, shiny-new twinklings mocking her in the mirror. She kept asking herself that universal question “why me?” She slid into depression, and even when she got out of the hospital she moved through a fog. Friends ignored. No work. Living at home. Lingering.

Somewhere in that monotony of all that her grandmother took sick. The night she died, Andrea decided enough was enough and made the conscious decision to take control of her life again.

Nine people died in that nightclub, including Andrea’s best friend, javier. One hundred sixty wounded. Her boyfriend nearly lost his leg and has almost no calf now, all the flesh and muscle having been torn away by the explosion. Several more of her friends were wounded as well. And then there was Javier. “Javi died in part because he was directly facing the bomb” Andrea explained. “it picked him up and slammed him against a wall. But I was standing sideways to it, that’s why only my left side really got hit. The concussion threw me too, but not with as much force.”

A miracle of angles and surface area. A miracle of one beat. A miracle of one tiny movement in dance that turned her sideways to the blast. A miracle of just the tiniest fraction of a second that ended one life and saved hers.

She’s taken that to heart in the years since…that harsh lesson about the brevity of it all, the infintesimally fine line between life and death. She shines and bounces and moves and smiles and laughs and listens. “I used to be indecisive and I worried alot. but not now. It’s so simple. None of that matters.” and she smiles again.