The world was a crumpled pop can in the shoulder. It once held something sweet, but upon its content’s consumption, was lofted from the window of a moving car. Discarded, it settled in the unkempt grass where it would remain undisturbed and gathering rainwater and road dust until the prisoners came with tongs on sticks and large, orange garbage bags. Aluminum cans never break down for reentry into the environment, at least not that we can track.
Once I was grown, I could never feel the sun like I did in childhood. I sometimes speculated that I had begun with an allocation of perceptional points like stem cells. It seemed my body was unable to produce more, and after mine had differentiated, all they could do was stay the same or degrade.
My psychiatrist tells me I am a sick person. It is often unclear whether she believes in misbalanced brain chemistry or misbalanced morals. Regardless, she is in the business of treating symptoms, not finding causes. Research is tedious, unappreciated work because we are never interested in process, only output. We are not rewarded for incorrect answers nor do we tend to travel ambiguously.
Psychiatry seems an amusing and more palatable way to repay the debts of knowledge, and may be microcosmic; the individual sets of data are manageable because there are case studies and literature reviews accessible from armchairs. It is not about doing the hard work, but using someone else’s. My psychiatrist does not like taking chances with her case studies, or at least me. Each of my behaviors is carefully catalogued and placed either under my main diagnosis or as a separate disorder. In her notes, these stragglers do not interact with my underlying sickness. Instead, they add to the formidable character I am on paper.
I think of how she thinks of me and become exhausted by all the numbers and proper nouns. As far as she is concerned, I am lucky to have her willing to orchestrate such an existence as mine with its veritable titles of bipolar disorder II, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder. Nearly each visit in the past six months has increased the crowding in my cupboard and decreased some part of me.
My psychiatrist provides all the sustenance I need in rows of plastic bottles procured by slips of paper; my life is driven by chemistry and mathematics. When my grandmother tries to pinch my waist and tells me, “honey, you’re getting too skinny,” I want to bring her to my apartment to see the rows of medications. I would show her that I am not losing weight because I am not eating enough; I am too thin because my cabinets are too full for food.
My mind has never been as empty as it is now. I try to explain this sensation to my psychiatrist, but she takes it as progress, remission, even. She feels successful in my numbness. “How’s your mood,” she asks, pen in hand, “you look calm.” “I can’t feel anything anymore,” I tell her. “Good,” she says, “that should decrease your suicidal ideations.”
I stared blankly at the throw pillow this visit has paid for. Where she finds the emptiness positive, I find discomforting, an impersonal silence hanging heavily like internal paralysis. We do not know each other and I do not wish to become acquainted, this unwelcome dweller and I. There is always tension between this entity of numbness and myself.
The sun was so clean that day in October. We were being honest and responsible by leaving at such an early hour. Our drive was to be sensible. My mother was proud from afar. I sat eagerly awake in the front seat until we got to Wisconsin and stopped for gas. Mary stayed sleeping in the back of the car while Bess and I entered the mini mart. Bess bought a bottle of water and I bought an extremely large fountain drink because it cost less than a dollar.
We exited the store blinking and rubbing our biceps. Bess and Mary switched places so that Bess could sleep, and I took my place behind the wheel. I loved driving and I always had. Mary and I listened to some music together for a little bit before she fell asleep, and then I was almost alone, drinking my pop and singing quietly.
After an hour, we passed a sign for a rest stop. Although I could have stopped to use the bathroom, I decided to amuse myself by waiting for the next one in sixty-four miles. By that point, I was dying, and pulled into the parking lot. Bess was already awake, and we gently woke Mary so that she could come in. The Excelerator hand dryer in the bathroom roused Mary enough that she wanted to drive. It was her car, so I had to pass over the driver’s sunglasses and car keys, even though I didn’t want to. There are four pictures that show us grinning in what we had no way of knowing were the last whole moments.
I laughed in the front seat with my legs propped on the glove box. Somehow a small, sun-bleached ladybug had found its way onto the dashboard. We were going seventy-five miles per hour in the left hand lane of the flat, two-lane highway. The ladybug flitted down somewhere. So did Mary’s eyes.
We had entered the grassy median. My grandfather entered my head and I pulled my legs down square to the floor. I started to tell Mary not to jerk the wheel, knowing she was going to. The second half of my sentence was lost on my lips as it gained life in Mary’s hands.
God entered my head for the first time in years. Our conversation began as I implored him not to let us flip. The moment in which our momentum shifted on its axis was impossibly long and silent. I thought of how I always pass out on roller coasters. We met the ground in violence over the front right wheel. My conversation with God continued as I begged for the flipping to stop. The world slowed, and I asked my final favor, that we might be so lucky to land on our wheels.
My prayer was answered. Everything was still and quiet in disbelief. I did not want to look around for fear that Bess and Mary were dead or horribly maimed. Frantically, I turned quickly to my left, and Mary and I met eyes briefly. We were okay. Her glance shifted downward again as we simultaneously opened our doors and stepped out onto the opposite shoulder. The sun was unperturbed by the destruction, and warmed the sticky blood covering my body.
I could not see anything and began keening, asking three times where all the blood was coming from. Bess sat on the grass clutching her elbow and crying. My body became irrelevant, and I refused to look at Mary or the car. We needed to call someone, but I could not find my phone in the front seat. Time was passing too vividly in esoteric sensations I can only remember in nightmares. There was nothing I wanted to find in the crumpled pop can of a car, so I did not try very hard.
A young blonde woman ran up to us. She had been driving behind us and had seen it all happen. I needed my phone but she told me I had to sit down and calm down. My injuries seemed unimportant, but I had not seen myself, nor was I able to probe the sources of blood to determine the extent of my wounds.
After fetching Mary’s favorite jacket to slow the blood pouring out of my head, the woman let me use her cell phone to call my parents. There was no answer at any of the numbers, so I left a message telling them that I had been in a car accident. The woman also left a message while surveying the scene, chomping her gum frantically all the while;; “Yeah, you know, uh, I , uh, well, the girls, the girls are, uh, okay, but, uh, I don’t, uh, think they’ll, uh, be driving the, uh, car home.”
I thought to myself; my therapist and I were going to have a lot to talk about. Before I had the chance to envision her detached tone, an ambulance skidded to a stop in the gravel of the median. “Don’t put that thing on me! I don’t need it! Stop,” I manically shouted despite the growing stiffness of my jaw. The team of EMTs was stronger than I was, and I found myself moments later being lifted then strapped onto a backboard. With my neck and head secured in a brace, my only view was of the vast cerulean sky above. Exhaustion and calm intersected, and I was still.
There was nothing I wanted to see, I supposed, but I could hear the rapid speech of rescue all around me. “We think this girl’s skull might be fractured; we need to get her out of here now,” filtered in. If I was going to die, I couldn’t hear about it or ask any questions about the mechanisms of my death, and I was glad to be hoisted into the cool ambulance. I needed to talk to my parents, immediately. The female EMT kept repeating, “Miss, you need to remain calm,” until I snapped, screaming like a feral animal, “I was just in a fucking car crash, I don’t know where the fuck my friends are, I don’t know where the fuck my parents are, and I don’t know if I’m going to fucking die!” She silently handed me her cell phone.
I was unable to reach my parents by the time I was being driven towards the helicopter that was going to airlift me somewhere, and the pain was becoming increasingly excruciating. The lady EMT was my friend now because she had the wonderful injections that kept me quiet in ten-minute bursts. It was unclear how much time had passed before I was out in the sun again, squinting, blind. She started pulling the blanket over my face, and I grew agitated. “What the fuck are you doing?” Apparently a newsman was taking pictures. My response was to raise my middle finger and begin hollering, “You motherfucker! You should be ashamed of yourself! I almost just died!” Although the EMTs were amused, their concerns regarding internal bleeding were heightened.
helicopter ride was a whirl of sounds and flashing lights that led me into a running examination in the hospital hallway administered by no less than fifteen doctors. In what felt like ten seconds, I had been hooked up to IV fluids, blood testing in progress, and x-rays taken. My mind was separate from my body. I had no way of placing myself and was in no way eager to familiarize my bloody self with my sterile surroundings. The procedures began blending together.
Four hours later, clothed in paper scrubs and my Timbersland boots, hair still wild with sticky blood, I was sent out into the waiting room. I sat huddled in a corner, wrapped in a blanket watching the room. There was nothing and no one I wanted to know there; I wanted my parents more than I ever had. Finally after an hour of shivering pitifully, Bess, Mary, and I were reunited. Bess began to cry as she took in my state, and Mary was unable to speak.
When my parents arrived to the hotel, I needed them to push the accident away. As my mother washed my blood-matted hair, she cried while I practiced not thinking. I had not been responsible and I did not want to hold the compacting of automobile against asphalt in my memory. The scars would be enough. My psychiatrist would take care of the rest. There was a bit more room in my cabinets and I knew she would have an eagerness to keep me numb, which is not to be mistaken with processing to forget. Aluminum cans never break down for reentry into the environment, especially when you become one yourself.
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