Tag: love

Summer, 1992. I was leaving my boyfriend’s house to head home. The night air held that particular warmth of early summer evenings—the kind that makes you believe everything is possible. I imagine I was thinking about England, where I’d soon be studying. Perhaps I was daydreaming about the perfect life that seemed to be unfolding before me. It was full of love. I was utterly in love.

And then, nothing.

The next moment in my memory is waking up in a hospital bed, looking at a woman I couldn’t recognize—my own mother. They tell me I flew 80 meters across the street when the car hit me. The driver never stopped. Never looked back to see the aftermath of their impact, both the physical body they’d broken and the future they’d altered.

I’ve had to reconstruct this night through police reports and courtroom testimonies. Witnesses described what I cannot remember. It’s disorienting to have such a significant moment of your life exist only in the accounts of strangers. It’s as if the narrative of my life has a tear in it, edges that don’t quite meet.

This was the summer before England. Before university. Before what should have been the beginning of everything.

What followed was not the perfect life I had meticulously planned. Looking back now, I see how that night became the first domino in a long sequence of self-destruction. The person who flew across that street never quite landed. Or perhaps she landed as someone else entirely.

I’ve spent years trying to understand why surviving led to destroying. Was it the traumatic brain injury altering something fundamental in my decision-making? Was it the brush with mortality that made me reckless? Or was it simpler than that—the realization that control is an illusion, that perfect lives don’t exist, that plans are just elaborate wishes?

The driver who hit me took many things. My memories of that night. My sense of safety. My trajectory. But perhaps the most significant thing they took was my belief in the orderly progression of life—that good choices lead to good outcomes, that we are the architects of our futures.

I’ve come to understand something else in the years since. That perfect life I thought I was destroying after the accident? It was never real. It was never possible. It existed only in the mind of a young woman who hadn’t yet learned that life isn’t a straight line but a series of collisions—some literal, some figurative—that push us in unexpected directions.

Sometimes I wonder who I would have become without that night. Would the perfect life have unfolded as planned? Or would some other moment have become my pivot point?

These questions have no answers. There is only this life—the one that began again in a hospital bed, looking at a mother I couldn’t recognize, piecing together a new understanding of myself from the fragments that remained.

It wasn’t the summer I expected. It wasn’t the life I planned. No bones were broken but something else was shattered.

Hit and run

More than silence was needed,
what was needed was at least a screaming fit,
a nervous breakdown, a fire,
doors slamming, a rushing about.
But you said nothing,
you wanted to cry, but first you had to straighten up your hair,
you asked me the time, it was 3 p.m.,
I don’t remember now which day, maybe a day
when it was I who was dying,
a day that had begun badly, I had left
the keys in the lock on the inside of the door,
and now there you were, dead (dead and even
looking dead!), gazing up at me in silence stretched out on the road,
and no one asked a thing and no one spoke aloud.

Manuel António Pina, translated by Alexis Levitin

I first found this poem while browsing books at a FNAC store in downtown Porto. It stuck with me because, while in high school, a colleague was run over. Another girl and I called a friend who lived near her family (pre-cell phone era). He went to get her mum and meet us at the hospital. When they finally arrived, this boy was furious. The girl’s mother had told him to wait while she did her hair and makeup.