Thoughts from a Bike Crash

Today when riding my bike home, I misjudged the distance between me and the car ahead of me. I hit my brakes too hard. My tires slid out on the wet pavement, my mind registered a single, “Oh crap,” and then the world flipped sideways. My body smashed the asphalt.

I was off the ground in a second, yelling, “Oh that hurts, oh that hurts!” to keep from crying as I stumbled over to the sidewalk, Zach following me trying to gather up my bike and see if I was okay. I sat on the curb, blood dripping my from elbow, and began to bawl.

It’s pretty much a representative example of the entire past month.

Sometimes life throws crises in your way, and you marathon through them as best you can; sometimes everything goes well, or at least nothing goes wrong, and you get to coast.

But sometimes, like the past month, a bunch of small to medium-sized things go wrong in a long succession. Each one individually isn’t that bad, not enough to kick you into crisis mode, but after a while you realize that you’ve been swimming through a river of low-key bad events for a long time and you want it to stop.

It’s sometimes hard to recognize this fact, since each bad thing is haunted by the specter of how bad it could’ve been. In the bike wreck, I could’ve hit the car in front of me. I could’ve broken my arm, or broken anything if I hadn’t hit the ground first on the fleshy part of my thigh. In the past, two of my three siblings have been in horrible bike crashes that racked up thousands of dollars in hospital bills, so I look at the scrapes on my arm and the road rash on my thigh and count myself lucky.

But in the meantime, my scrapes hurt every time I move my arm. My shoulder aches. My thigh is throbbing. The wounds make everything a little more difficult. 

After the wreck a police officer stopped and insisted on calling an ambulance even though I didn’t hit my head. But after a few minutes of shivering in the cold rain (I was wearing short sleeves, of course), I decided we should just bike home. Once inside, I curled up on the couch and began to cry. I laid down for a while and cried, then I got up and put the load of laundry in the dryer and cried, then I walked upstairs and heated up Zach’s lunch and still cried. At last this dissolved into whimpering and occasional bursts of tears, but by the time he left for work I felt downright calm. 

Because when you’re swimming in a tide of small bad things, you just have to keep going. You bike home. You finish the deadline. You pay for the car repairs. You feed yourself. You do what’s right in front of you and try not to think about the rest.

It’s not a long-term solution, but sometimes it’s all you can do. So that’s where I’m at right now, doing one little thing at a time and knowing that someday, eventually, I’ll swim out of the current and find my feet touching solid ground.

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