1.) Humor is recommended. Now is your time. No one will ever find you more hilarious than in this moment. You’re bleeding from the head. You’re curled up in the grass on the side of the road. The details of your injuries and what happened exactly is being shared with passing motorists and a gathering crowd of horrified children. “Hi there!” you holler, waving a bloody hand.
It’s not even a joke, really, but even the six-year-olds begin to chortle with glee. Ha. Ha. Ha!
2.) All men want to do is pick you up. Then, preferably, carry you someplace useful, but if they haven’t figured out where that is yet, that won’t prevent them from getting started. If one man is already picking you up, another man may join in. There is in fact no limit to how many men that may try to carry you at once, nor to how many locations they suspect may be more ideal.
3.) Your bones are awesome. A moment of silence, please, for your rockin’ bones. “How did you not break your nose?” someone asks. “The way you were laying there, I really thought you’d broken your arm,” says another. Personally, there had been a time when you’d been convinced all of your ribs had been destroyed.
“. . . Yoga?” you reply.
4.) The picture didn’t even come out! What the fuck! That is some serious bullshit!
You joke to others that because what you were doing at the time was so stupid, there is no sense of injustice, no anger at a higher power. But you fail to mention this fucking shit.
Seriously. What. The. Fuck. You could have destroyed an entire ribcage for that picture.
5.) All memories of this are auditory. You will have flashbacks of the accident, as you have flashbacks of everything — you tend to spend a lot of your life reliving. But contrary to everything else you have envisioned over and over, angles of sunlight and looks in the eye, none of these memories will be visual. You like to think it’s your indie-radio-producer-arteest self announcing its presence, but more than likely it’s due to the fact that your eyes were closed at the time.
Crack, crunch, crack, crack, crack. So much gravel and pavement! So much plastic, metal and bone! That is your helmet dragging on asphalt. That is your face hitting the ground. That is your hip and that is your hand, those are your sunglasses and clack goes the bike.
6.) And so, every time you think of it, you remember it as if your bones are breaking. And so when you remember it you tend to grab yourself by the arms, as if your whole body could fall apart this very minute. You run your tongue over your teeth.
7.) Three seconds later you’re back in reality, and if someone were to ask you if you’d ride your bike again you’d scoff. “Are you kidding me?” you’d say. “I was doing the stupidest thing I could possibly think of doing on a bicycle, going as fast as I’ve ever gone on a bicycle, and look what happened to me: scrapes and bruises. I feel safer on a bicycle now than I ever could have before!”
The weird thing is, it’s true. You just need to buy a replacement seat, and a new helmet.
8.) Call your parents before you blog about it. You know, I can’t believe I even need to say this one. I assumed we were long past this; sometime around the days you learned not to blog disparagingly about your boss’ children — the umbrella rule being, “people read the internet (p.s. act and write accordingly).” Why don’t you put that in your pipe and relive it?
