Betwixt Two Worlds After The Crash

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I have been standing betwixt now for a whole month. It’s always the case that just when I feel like I have arrived in a moment or at an understanding that something jolts me off this fixed position I am mistaking for a refuge. Yeah, it’s one of those essays, another angsty bit of prose channeled from the depths of the aftermath of gettin’ hit by a driver not paying. I thought that rolling off that hood and landing on my own two feet and being able to yell at the driver like a feral gerbil demonstrated that I am fine. I thought that going back to the scene of where I was hit the next day and riding through the intersection proved that I would not be kept from my riding. Yet, circumstances would have it that I just needed to sit here and not feel very fine about how truly unsafe I am on a bike in a car-centric society re-designed in the 50s and 60s to allow distracted people to hurl themselves in steel exoskeletons toward their destinations.

It’s wild how hard I have worked to avoid that deeply humbling truth about riding in America. Sure, it took me 15 years of riding before I got hit, but this is just the truth of living and riding in the United States. You are just one distracted driver or autonomous driving vehicle malfunction away from being killed by the wheels of death. We all know of someone who is mangled or dead just from trying to ride their bike somewhere. Indeed, any day we ride could be the last day we ever get to pedal.

The irony of my situation is that the driver who hit me “really didn’t mean it.” As I was bopping around like a hamster on speed with all the adrenaline in my system the woman who hit me kept saying, “You know I didn’t hit you on purpose.” Ahh, thank you. I am so glad you didn’t hit me on purpose. Well, you still pulled at least 10 feet through a stop sign into a bike lane before stopping to see if you could proceed through oncoming traffic. As we well know, intentions don’t mean shit in such instances when you can’t be bothered to just stop at a stop sign and not t-bone a person riding a bike through a bike lane well behind the stop sign setback.

Their intentions are even less of interest given that they have not called once to check in on me. This person has no cell phone and no answering machine on their land line. I called once to give an update on the process. No one answered the phone and there was no way to leave a message. One would expect then that the onus is on them to call and check in on the process. Nope, no call. They just pummeled my soft body and pushed it right out their mind. They just kept right on living after shattering my sense of safety.