redrockrivieraOn April 30, 2018, I was hit by a car. Hoping to catch a bus, I ran out into the street in front of the Osobowice Cemetery in Wrocław and a blue Opel Corsa or Insignia crashed into me at the crossing. The memory of the exact moment it happened was gone hours later. I was admitted to the hospital with a fractured pubic bone; even as I was getting my X-ray, I struggled to return to the instant I was flying through the air, and I wanted to return. But, it was gone, or maybe the moment itself was too fleeting to produce the vivid replayable memory I had hoped for. I step out onto the road, I have the bus in my sight, the world blinks out for a fraction of a second and suddenly I can feel the rough asphalt on my cheek. I get up on my feet but a handful of witnesses gathers around me and urges me to lay back down. I wonder if I'm bleeding from the head. I later find out I have a scrape on my forehead, a cut under my jaw and a split lip. There's road rash on my wrists. They call the ambulance. They call the cops. (The cops arrive first.) I try not to look anyone in the eyes. I'm ashamed. I think I would prefer to just crawl over where no one can see me and lick my wounds clean. When the paramedics come, I can no longer stand on my left leg. All my primary sources of this event are gone. I don't know where I can find the journal entries I wrote in the hospital, still coming down from the shock and morbidly obsessed with my situation. All my photos from the time are gone too. I took a lot of selfies in the hospital, gross and unwashed and healing. I remember the look in my eyes in the very first photo I took of myself after the event: bewildered, distant, the preserved expression of a deer in the headlights, even though on the inside I felt nothing but composure. I remember the smell of the scabs that grew over me in time, and I can only describe it as bodily. Visceral. One day in the hospital, shortly before I was released, a doctor, upon entering my room, with no sufficient warning, reached his hand to touch the site of the fracture -- the tender skin right at the top of the inner thigh that connects with the pelvis. It was a rote, lustless motion, and I knew his intention before he even reached me, but for a split second my heart was in my throat. He asked me if I was in any pain anymore and I said no. I came back to school right in time for an exchange trip to Denmark. Me and a classmate of mine, a girl I felt amity towards, but in whom I wasn't interested past a simple acquaintanceship, stayed together with one of the Danish students. One morning, when we were having breakfast, she suddenly brushed my bottom lip with her thumb, thinking that the scar from the crash was a crumb of chocolate. Startled and bashful, I explained her mistake to her. There was no one in the world back then that I would permit to touch me that way. What I'm sure was nothing to her was to me a kind of deflowering. She ended up briefly dating the Danish boy who accomodated us. I think I was briefly jealous of her. To this day, I often look for the traces of that scar in the mirror. I can still find it, the same way I can still find the remnant of the cut under my chin, but I'm afraid no one else would notice it without being properly instructed what to look for. The driver of the Opel was an elderly man. He was completely innocent in all this. I dented his car with my hip. I'm sure this was all way scarier to him than it was to me.
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