Girl on the Run

essay: that one time I was hit by a car and disabled for life

This essay has photos and may be too long for email, make sure to expand the newsletter as you go. 🖤

Or you can listen to an audio recording of the essay here (I did my best eek):

photo by my partner William, documenting me after a motor vehicle accident, December, 2015

In the Nike store a few months ago, I tried on shoes.

I slid on a sleek pair, white as snow with pink laces and a pointed toe for speed. The dolphin of shoes. In the mirror, I looked hot.

The salesman came over and said, Nice choice, this style is great for running.

I said, Oh I can’t run! I laughed and he took my cue and laughed with me.

Literally, I can’t run. I said. I’m disabled. And I laughed some more. The irony tickled me.

The salesman became silent and his cheeks blushed. I’m so sorry. He said.

Oh, no, don’t worry. I said. I can waddle.

I have a dark sense of humor and I forget strangers don’t know this about me. He boxed up my old shoes and placed them into a bag so I could strut my new shoes out the door. My limp undetectable to the untrained eye.

Well, I was wrong, because tonight I ran for the first time in almost a decade.

At 7:16PM. I ran along a path by the beach, with a moon in the sky and the last blue light of sunset on the horizon. I listened to music and the ocean was in my chest. And I cried.

I used to run, you know, before I was hit by a car while riding a motorcycle. I used to be one of those abled people in sneakers.

The accident.

Christmas Eve, 2015.

A car incoming, no blinkers, rushing, changing lanes. A crash, a fall, an impact. Head slammed and slid, or tumbled and crumpled—who knows, it happened so fast—and my body, to anybody who saw it, became a mangled puppet on the street.

Goodbye consciousness. I went out like a burst lightbulb. Suspended in a blank dark space, shrinking, smaller and smaller.

I was dying.

I approached emptiness.

I became nothing.

Then, suddenly, I woke up inside an ambulance. Awake for a handful of seconds and absolutely off my rocker.

My concern was to wonder if I was being a bother and if I could help, meanwhile emergency responders cut off my clothes and removed my piercings. A paramedic with blonde hair reassured me. She spoke with wide shocked eyes, full of urgency, but then smiled while holding in a laugh. Like, you know when you see a child doing something life-threatening but also funny? She made a similar expression: This woman is fully dying and is worried about putting me out?!

Yes, the fear of being an inconvenience brought me back from the dead.

What I didn’t know yet was: no more running.

My pelvis had been crushed into pieces.

It all started when I was eleven. I longed for freedom. So, I ran marathons in a program called “Girls on the Run.” Swatting away summer flies from my skin as I bloomed brown in the endless sun, laughing with the girls next to me.

During college, I ran through the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, or sometimes up the hill from my mom’s house, in the forest and along a fireroad, which snaked through the edges of Muir Woods.

In my early twenties right before the accident, I made a new habit of running over Mt. Tamalpais on the Dipsea trail, every Sunday after a long work week. Proud of the challenge a steep incline gave me.

I’m on a mothafuckin mountain! I’d say, as I arrived to the top of the peak. I was always running towards something I desperately wanted or away from something I wished to avoid.

Then one day, I was interrupted, and everything changed.

No walking.

No sitting.

No fucking.

No shitting.

Somebody wheeled me into the trauma center for critical care and then the ICU and then I was in the hospital for weeks. Medical professionals in my community chose to go into work and save my life, instead of spending the holidays at home with their families. I had dozens of X-Rays and scans and a couple surgeries. They put me back together again with steel screws. They made me a bionic woman.

My brain wasn’t convinced I needed to be conscious for all of this. I was in and out of awareness for days.

A bruise had bloomed on my brain and my thoughts were sluggish flickering things, like fireflies at dusk wandering the air, not sure if it was time to turn on yet. I was lucky I could sort of feel my legs. I was lucky I could say anything at all.

I asked for water and a person in green scrubs put a sponge in my mouth. I suckled a few drops from it, desperate to quench my thirst. More please. I said, but they refused to give me anymore. I slipped back into unconsciousness.

When the car hit me or when I hit the ground, my spine had cracked in twelve places. My blood had forged a clot deep in my veins. And the ovary needed help. My shoulder blade had been fractured too. I could hear them telling me the unbelievable list of things. Injury to the liver, kidney and spleen. I lodged the list into my memory to explain each fresh pain I felt, as I drifted in and out. I knew even in unconsciousness, the disassembly of my pelvis threatened me the most.

You might feel this. A sudden drilling through my femur as my leg was put into traction.

Oh, I can feel it. You woke me up.

Somebody out of focus attached a water weight to my foot, to pull my shattered sacrum down into place. It dangled from the edge of my hospital bed for two days.

Thanks for the jewelry.

photo by William, I requested nude portraits while confined to a hospital bed at home for all of Winter, 2016. 35mm film.

One time in college, I ran across the city in the middle of the night just to see the boy I loved, William. He lived in a district close to me and yet our apartments were split up by the Golden Gate Park, which was miles long. I imagined the park was like a stone wall separating lovers in a Shakespearian play. You either drove around it or you went straight through.

Obstacles are fucking romantic.

Through the park I sprinted. I sprawled out my arms in the thick darkness. As if embracing the space between the trees, where you can’t see what may be hiding there. I welcome the dark! I hooted. Determined to control any fear. Aware of how far away my apartment was behind me. I kept going until I broke through to the street again. I was always running towards love.

Ding dong.

Hey, I wanted to see you.

Out of breath. Smiling.

Did you run here?

Hands, reaching. Pulling me inside.

In the hospital, I was awake now and lucid. In this moment, at least, before I needed to press the morphine button again. I’d been here for two weeks. Whenever a family member came to visit me I’d tell them jokes.

Auntie, the pain is nothing compared to a Brazilian wax.

I discovered a large tube had been surgically placed into my left lung while I was out. Six ribs were broken and my lung had collapsed in the accident. A pneumothorax, is what the medical staff called it. My deflated lung was like a sad farting balloon at an abandoned birthday party and needed rescuing. The tube was stuffed between my ribs and into what felt like the center of my body, attached to a suction machine to drain the fluid and allow my lung to re-expand. Fill me with helium and let me float away!

I always thought science was cool.

Pain was returning. Here and there, and everywhere. I pressed the morphine button and fell asleep mid-sentence. How long will it take to…

Lately, I’ve been feeling a compulsion to paint my pelvis over and over again, like Frida Kahlo’s pelvis, the way hers floats there disembodied on the canvas in the 1932 painting, “Henry Ford Hospital.” A statement. A poem. A question mark? I use words instead. I paint my pelvis with my tongue, in a repetition like a prayer. I beg to know the bone. I imagine the bone is clay so I can manipulate it back into shape.

The pelvis looks like a butterfly. The wings of ilium open, it flutters when I walk, flashes iridescent colors when I run. The bowl is home to my ovaries, my uterus, my sex organs, all the nerves which connect between my legs. The pelvis rocks back and forth on a lover. It’s where I’d create a fetus if I wanted to. But the pelvis opens up in pregnancy, a butterfly in flight. The pelvis holds the swollen head of a baby as they press against you to come out. A baby would have no caution for the damage there.

I can’t believe I ran again tonight.

What I love most about running is the moment you feel like a sonic boom. You pick up enough speed to pop a seal and break the sound barrier, and you imagine freedom for the first time. Like a hummingbird dropping itself over the edge of a cliff, moving faster than a fighter jet, and afterwards quickly flying back up into the sky.

When you break into a sprint, it’s like all this time you were trapped and now you’ve escaped. You have a total possession of yourself and your environment.

All the chaos is behind you, shrinking into the distance.

You’re gone.

You’re a girl on the run.

My world looked upside-down when I sat up for the first time in my hospital bed, with a pelvis as delicate as a fallen leaf on the sidewalk you crunch under your shoe.

I couldn’t see straight. My perspective had shifted while lying down for several weeks, I almost fell over and a nurse lifted me up. With practice, I could sit up for longer periods and the warped image in my brain smoothed out, but my understanding of the world and how I fit into it never did right itself all the way, even as I learned to walk again months later.

Who was I in this body? Restrained by a pain without elegance. New disabilities. Still and motionless. My spirit overfilled and pressed against the inside of my skin. I became taught with grief and stagnant energy.

I had no idea it would be another nine years to glimpse the world as I had known it.

photo by William, “Amani swinging a cane around,” 35mm film, 2016

Tonight is the night, baby!

Who’s a bad bitch? I’m a bad bitch!

Who’s a bad bitch? I’m a bad bitch!

Go go go!

I ran for a whole minute. Lifted off the beach path and broke the sound barrier. I was a fucking glory. Forget a hummingbird, I was a panther.

A feline.

A danger.

I envisioned myself strong and powerful with every step.

All the physical therapy and the tough choices, and all the days I begged my body into confidence, were paying off. I knew I’d never be back to “normal.”

A little bit had to be enough.

I sprinted until I couldn’t anymore.

As I stood there on the beach path, catching my breath, a cold wind blew inland from the water. I let the breeze turn my nose icy and rustle my hair. The hush sound of waves was almost inauadble under the sound of my breath and blood.

I watched the moon and the waves and the lights on the ships in the distance, my chest open…I did it. I had spent months making myself stronger to get to this moment. I begged for transformation and, finally, I achieved it, hyper-aware of its impermanence.

I clung onto this small encounter with myself: now a memory of goodness recorded into the bones of my body.

A crescent moon after sunset, on my first run, 2024, iphone photo

I walked over to my car and slid into the driver’s seat laughing, like I did as a child during those summers on the long dirt path. Running a race as a commitment to myself to keep pushing, to carry myself to the end. And in the end pushing still, even when no longer on two legs, and in another form, in a wheelchair and with a cane, or when the weight of my spirit becomes heavy as lead, I promise to carry on.

I shut the door and in the silence I felt a shift. A tether snapping. I cried.

Happy tears? Or mournful tears?

My hands on the steering wheel glowed yellow in the light of a McDonald’s sign on the street corner. I turned my gaze over to the middle distance, enchanted by moonlight rippling on the surface of seawater.

Proud. I was a person with a life.

photo by William, butterflies in hair, 35mm film, 2018

See you soon, have a good week and read like mad.