‘It felt like when you wake up from a dream’
FOR 17-year-old Amelia, it was the first concert she had been to without her mum.
Standing six feet away from the bomber, shrapnel became embedded in her face and her hand was badly damaged.
For months afterwards, she could feel the metal working its way out of her skin.
“It’s the first thing I see when I look into the mirror,” she says.
Recalling May 22, she says she remembers following a crowd and then her ‘ears going underwater and her face burning’.
“I remember going up into the air and then hitting the floor. My ears felt like moss, like flying, like pitterpattering in my ears.
“I could still see this bright light. It felt like when you can’t wake up from a dream.”
Amelia also remembers what she saw - the sights and sounds seared in her memory.
She’s since quit college and now struggles to go shopping in Manchester with friends.
“Before all this I’d go out all the time. I only had to think about college exams and things like that. It was quite fun and it was just good.
“It makes me realise how much everything has changed.
“My mum is finding it harder to cope with things. She’s always thinking about how it could happen again.”
For her 18th birthday, Amelia swaps a big night out for a low-key party at home.
Her mum struggles to let her out of her sight, terrified of losing her.
When Amelia suggests a day out with friends to Liverpool, her mum’s reaction is one of anxious worry.
“I need to try more to let her do normal things that she would be doing if this hadn’t have happened to us,” she says.
“What’s the alternative? Making her stay in all the time. She’s going to have no life.”
For her mum, letting Amelia out of her sight takes her back to May 22 the night Amelia’s phone ‘rang and rang and rang’ with no reply.
Racing to the Arena, a guard told her she couldn’t pass him ‘because there were dead bodies’.
She recalls falling to the floor, believing Amelia to be among them.
In fact, Amelia was nearby with paramedics. When her mum found her, she was covered in blood.
“I wasn’t there and I am a mum. I should have been there for her. I should have looked harder and faster. We just couldn’t find her in the chaos.
“When I think a terrorist did try to kill her when she was only six feet away, it takes my breath for a little while.
“The physical wounds will heal but she’ll never ever forget what she’s seen.
“She’s a lot braver than I am, If it was up to me she’d just sit at home with me under a duvet on the couch all day and we’d just watch movies.”
In the documentary, Amelia and her mum bravely decide to attend another concert together at the Arena.
Afterwards, Amelia is defiant: “I don’t want to let it ruin my life. What’s the point in not enjoying other concerts and letting that one thing stop it.”