Following is the winning entry from the 2017 Fountain Hills Coalition Essay Contest, written by Fountain Hills High School junior Noah Ohnsorg.

What key element is necessary to create a strong friendship?

On the three year anniversary of the heart-wrenching highway collision that nearly took my sister’s life, I acknowledge how blessed I am to still see her every week; to watch as she nurtures a family of her own; to bask in the radiant joy that I somehow kept my greatest friend.

But the tortuous journey to our shared bliss engraved mental scars into our lives; even today, those lesions sting with past pain and tribulation. How, then, did my sister and I manage to make it this far?

Looking back, our relationship buckled under the immense pressure of a grim reality. I was fourteen years old, holding back the boredom of the final months of a middle-school Algebra class, when a phone call from the office announced to me that an ambulance was rushing my sister to the hospital.

The following silence stuck to the air in a perpetual prison. Screeching sirens ringing within my head, I learned through my mother that a double rollover nearly crushed my sister’s spine. I trembled at the thought of her beloved green truck darting off the road and plummeting into a ditch, smoke and fumes clogging the air with a sinister finality. Then a silver lining pierced the darkness: my sister survived, barely, but there was hope.

Standing beside my sister’s unconscious body, a doctor explained how her spine twisted and compressed during the accident; how glass shards bore deep into her back, straight through her tattoo of an angel’s wing.

My family understood well that she was lucky to be alive. Due to her critical condition and the traumatic impact of the situation, my sister grew distant, distorted like her spine, and the months following her recovery proved strenuous on our relationship.

Of course, even with doctor's’ approval, she never truly recovered mentally. Unexpectedly, like the burst of a lightbulb, she disappeared, presumably to escape her own mental torture; however, she only spread her torment to me.

Enduring what the family saw as a loss, my mother instructed me to sever all ties to my sister, to possibly help her with tough love. The idea of losing someone so close, so loved, so vitally pertinent to my happiness was foreign to my mind; never before had my closest friend been so utterly ripped out of existence.

First days, then weeks, months, and years trudged by without a sign of my sister. Though I felt the cold sting of solitude without her, I refused to believe that she abandoned me altogether. As an ultimate gesture of loyalty, I never ceded the token of faith that she would one day return and mend our emotional tears with love. Through her independent struggle, she deserved at least this devotion, a blind ambition of the future.

Then, after more than a year of waiting, she came home.

Her arrival was unexpected and carried the burden of a heartbroken family and bitter welcome, but I graciously traded a year’s worth of suffering for another moment enclosed in her warm embrace.

Along with her arrived the announcement of a new baby, my own nephew, and a new beginning. She earned a part-time job close to home and sought to settle down in the hearty fashion of peace that the entire family desired. For the moment, I didn’t want to know about the dismal life she faced or about the immense toil that brought her to my doorstep once more.

I waited over a year to see her again; the only thing that mattered was that my best friend was alive. Still, to see her rosy cheeks and buoyant smile once again did not surprise me. Somehow, I knew she would return, even when everybody else gave up. Somehow, I held on to hope.

Hope exists in every human, but is lost easier in some than in others; it waits patiently inside the subconscious before rising to challenge fear; it persuades us to dispel anxiety and summon courage instead; it condenses into a fine fabric, imperceptible, yet unbreakable, that catches the weight of failure and gives the desperate mind a sanctuary to rest.

Perhaps this is why my sister and I now fasten a matching set of silver angels to the visors in our cars—a humble reminder that even when it seems we have nothing else, we always have each other.

We always have hope.