“What, you aren’t happy?” My friend Ammir said mildly. “Not with –” he gestured with three fingers to the pristine, green yard, new money crisp with a crowd of thirty or so people bouncing to a pop song, ella nada le duele… y yo voy, voy, voy… “ – all of this?”
I knew what he meant and saw the tableau vivant of the last two weeks in my mind: Arcadian rural villages and Mayan ruins trembling with the long, long weight of human history, carved wooden bowls and faience, the flickery turquoise tail of the motmot bird just vanishing beyond my sight, everything beautiful, perfect, perfect.
“No,” I said, laughing, “Not really.”
–
There was this anecdote I liked to tell about the accident, which I had down to a script:
“I was sitting in the front seat of the ambulance, you know, they’re taking us to the hospital, and the guy driving turns to me and goes, ‘Car accidents happen all the time, don’t feel too bad about it.’ (I imitate myself, wide-eyed and shell-shocked, like a trembling chihuahua). ‘Really?’ And then the guy takes both hands off the wheel and turns around, is kind of rummaging through this box in the backseat, and goes, ‘Oh yeah, I was in one myself two weeks ago.’ (Here, I turn back to my audience.) And I was like, ‘Okay, I guess I’m about to be in a Russian nesting doll of car accidents.’”
The way people tell stories about their physical injuries is so telling – what people choose to mythologize, what they fail to mention. I never understood until I had my own stories to tell. My principal investigator, Al, told me how he’d knocked out a few teeth in a bike accident a decade ago, and how he still had teeth slowly in the process of dying. The boy I eventually fell in love with told me on the day we met about how, as a baby, he’d gone blue in the hospital and never regained that circulation in his hands or feet.
A story is repetitive. It’s simple to identify the nouns people build around their injuries, the soothing sentence-after-sentence cadence: the bike, the car, the surgeon, the dentist. The mother, the father, the MRI room. And for myself, the truck, the intersection, the hospital.
I codified the accident into a story, and then a series of stories I could tell – I had to have a response, of course, to “What happened?” But whatever I didn’t repeat became blurrier. And I didn’t like to bring down the mood too often – I hated the sad eyebrows people always gave me at its mention (the Oh, God, I’m sorry, I just heard face) – if there were more ways to tell a story about a car accident laughing, I would have told them. That, and I preferred to laugh. The story became a salve that expanded in the uneasy space between myself and myself. And my God, was there an element of absurdity to it all that was easy to remember – how I sat in the emergency room in bubble braids with blood on my little pink miniskirt, half a lash dangling from a lachrymose eye.
Another anecdote I liked to tell:
“So this guy is wheeling me to the MRI machine, and as he’s pushing me down the hallway he’s like, ‘So what happened to you?’ I’m like, you know, (here I present the traumatized chihuahua demeanor), ‘Car accident.’ And the guy goes, ‘Oh. That’s bad.’ And I can’t even turn my head to look at him because my neck is sprained, so I turn my whole body around and go, ‘Yeah, obviously.’ He just shut up and put a shock blanket on me.”
It would have been the easy way out to perform my cute stand-up comedy routine and try to forget, and in terms of pain, I had never shied away from that – take the ibuprofen, take the melatonin – but instead, there was Mexico.
As a member of the University of Florida’s flagship Stamps-Lombardi Program, I was very privileged and very required to attend a study abroad program in Mérida, Mexico approximately two weeks after my brush with death.
Our group that summer was a smattering of juniors, the sophomore cohort, and then my cohort: a collection of ten plucky, well-socialized freshmen, plus myself. Meeting thirty new people at once in an airport before departing to live in a foreign country for two months freshly out of high school had not precisely been in my recovery plan, but I was determined to buck up. I only had to tell the same story on a larger scale: here is a well-adjusted girl who has been through something somewhat traumatic, but is eager to try new things and have a nice time and a chuckle about the whole thing, because, let’s be honest, people get into car accidents all the time. Very well-adjusted. Please disregard the flinching.
I didn’t want anybody to think I was a melodramatic person.
At the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, I squeaked around in a rolling chair idly, waiting for class to start. It was the rainy season, a wet, heavy June. My friends, Austin and Kate, and I had tracked water in on the white linoleum floors, where it was collecting in puddles beneath our chairs as we watched raindrops outside weigh down the lush, wide-brimmed leaves of the bromeliads.
“Wait,” I said. “Wasn’t Owen with us?”
Austin looked up from his phone. “Oh, yeah. I guess he went off somewhere.”
The rain was coming down in warm, monsoon-like torrents. I glanced outside. “Does anyone know where he is? Shouldn’t we go check on him? Like, is he okay?”
Kate smiled at me. “He’s an adult. He’ll be fine.”
“Oh,” I said.
So I spent a lot of my time alone in Mexico. At least, as alone as was possible in a structured study abroad program. I withdrew myself silently during dinners and on field trips, feeling this kind of desperate dog-like urge to just be away, and I would run, hard, in a straight line. Despite this I craved closeness with other people, and even as sitting at a table with a large group of people chattering and laughing sent me into overwhelming panic attacks, I was tugging at my own shirtsleeve, begging myself to stay. Did they think I was normal? Did they think I was funny?
I was terrified that my explanations for my behavior weren’t enough. Shamefully, I missed the long, dark burn on my collarbone. It had been in such a strange, visible place (and boxed in by two thin, diagonal lines the perfect width of a seatbelt) that it articulated something I had too much shame or self-awareness to verbalize – that something terrible and wrong had happened to me, something that hadn’t happened to anybody else. The physical wound was clarity. It was the proof and witness to the fact of my pain, and now that it had healed, there was only my stumbling, hysterical word.
Here’s an anecdote I haven’t told about Mexico:
“I started writing about the accident pretty much the day after it happened. It was one of those things that I just couldn’t carry anymore, so I had to put it down. And I started writing this memoir about it all, this long memoir, I think it was maybe 20 pages in the end. While I was on the trip, I was still in that stage of being, essentially, a half-cracked egg, but I was trying real hard to keep it together. And one day I showed part of it to someone else who was on the trip – she was a couple of years older than me and a really talented writer. Madigan read it, and then instead of critiquing my writing, she said to me, ‘I promise you, there will be a time when you don’t think about it every day. I don’t know when, but I promise you that.’ She cracked me. She saw completely through the words I had so carefully constructed and chosen, and saw the wound. Most people don’t want to see the wound.”
I have a personal intolerance for people using kintsugi as a metaphor for trauma – besides the fact that it’s overdone, I don’t like what it stands for. When something breaks in you, repair it with gold. What does that entail? Rework your pain, beautifully, and then the crack is filled? Your damage is then productive and worthwhile?
The real story of the accident, without the claustrophobia of any jokes, is this: I was making a left turn. It was the last turn to my friend’s house. The last turn. I didn’t see it, but there was a pickup truck coming. All I felt was force and pressure on my chest, I guess that was the airbag. When I opened my eyes, there was blood everywhere. His eyes were closed. I was shouting his name. I couldn’t hear myself because I hit my head. I kept shouting his name. His arm was shattered and the guilt drove me insane.
It took a long time to be honest with myself about the depth to which I suffered. And it wasn’t funny.
Something in me did break that day, but the idea of repairing it with “gold” was ludicrous. That implies a linearity to healing, a finality, and something of a lack of that honesty.
Stories have the structural support beams of a beginning, a climax, an ending, and the nouns that inhabit it. Here is the reason you cannot write a story about healing: there is no end to that story. There is no immutability and no narrative to it – it begins again every single day.
(Anyways, in traditional kintsugi, the cracks are first patched with lacquer and then painted over with gold. Suffice to say you can do the same thing with a story.)
Close to when I stopped writing my memoir about Mexico and the accident, I realized I wasn’t sure how to end it. I wrote pages and pages about the billowy starry sky in Río Lagartos, the apocalyptically stormy walk home in Campeche. The night on the beach we watched a sea turtle lay eggs, and everyone was saying I love you, I love you, even though earlier that day we had gotten into fights in the van about whose Pop-Tarts were whose. I wrote about observing the people around me, the way they moved and shook their legs and whispered to one another and looked at one another, the light there; how to not be part of it at all was painful and lovely, a bright deep ache. I wrote about the friends I made in Mexico, who made my days into happier ones.
There is no single anecdote for this part – only that I remember singing off-key renditions of The Mountain Goats songs (gleefully: “I hope you die! I hope we both die!”) and getting pizza in during an endless thunderstorm, laughing, forgetting, belonging… I was sick one day in Cobá, in every sense of the word – homesick, stomach-sick – and my friend Jaïm offered to walk the mile back to the hotel with me. I said no, and marveled the whole mile at the idea of being a person who, without needing to add anything else to the world, was worth extending that hand of kindness to.
Then eventually, there was no more Mexico to write about.
The days, as they are wont to do, kept coming. Every day was as thin as paper, but on top and on top of one another, now nearly four hundred sheets of paper away, the black hole of that first day became indistinct. There was no epiphanic moment of “healing,” except every day I moved a day further from the accident. And there was no conclusion to that – only an infinite number of beginnings.
Finally that moment did come, the one that Madigan foretold, that first day when I didn’t think about the accident at all. It slipped by without fanfare or grand choirs – no climax, no glorious moment of realization. It was a day, one of many, where I loved and was loved by the people around me. If you asked me to name a calendar date, I wouldn’t be able to, which was the best part.
And the days are still coming. I see them before me like a long stretch of lighted street lamps, receding gently into a warm orange glow. I never thought it would be such a wonderful thing.
UF PRISM 