November 10, 2026

There was the sight of you, in the hospital room with me, knowing you were okay was a balm.

There was the map in the ceiling tiles that my eyes found, those days I wasn’t allowed to sit up.

There were the nights you stayed with me, sleeping in a recliner, or trying to.

There were the days you combed my hair and put it in pigtails.

There were the smoothies brought me to keep me fed.

There were all the flowers, and cards, and visitors.  There was the party sting and crayon dragons to protect me.

There were the people who held the door of the elevator open for me, when I wheeled in for physical therapy.  There were the people I held the door for, when I was able to walk again.

There were the sessions where I wept as Marco ground the heel of his hand into my shoulder, trying to get the muscle and tendons to loosen.

There were the nights I put myself to sleep by carefully arranging each broken limb between pillows.

There are the children that still remember.

How I was in a wheelchair. How I visited them at school, rolled around the gym with them.  These are the brakes? Why are there these little wheels in the back? To keep me from tipping, (tipping being such a quaint idea considering how I’d flown and crumpled in a mess of broken bones) and tipping being something I really didn’t want to do, not in the state of repair I was in.

There was the day Lydia told me to stand up, get out of the chair, walk to the parallel bars in the middle of the room. There were the steps I took to do it.

There are the people I haven’t seen in a year or more, who marvel at how normal I look now.  How easily I move about. 

And there are the people I meet who wouldn’t know, don’t know how broken I was. Not unless they catch a glimpse of the scar on my arm, or how cautiously I get up and down from the floor.

I still can’t run.  As in jog in the morning, like I used to.  I tried in June when school was out, and for a week or so I ran each morning, never hitting my stride, and then my tibia started to ache.  The one brake that never hurt until the screw had to be taken out (it wasn’t in deep enough, so when the swelling around me knee when down I could feel the screw head (a Phillips).

The sight of someone in a t-shirt with the Batman logo on it, catches me. Returns me to him, the man who hit me, was distraught, then drove off.  Carrying the recklessness of his behavior, his selfishness, with him. Who leaves a woman broken on the road after hitting her because he wasn’t paying attention as he made a left turn, hits her at 15, 20 miles an hour. Sends her flying into the air off the front of his SUV.

I no longer refer to my left arm as the arm. I no longer feel like I’m tipping over, if I stand in one place too long. I’m wearing my Birkenstocks again. Just my pinky toe is still asleep, the nerves grown back on the sole of my foot. I dream about hikes through trees, finding the silver shimmer of water around a bend. Its not too much further, till I’m there.