Bike Riding with a Boy

Francesca

It’s what I get for bike riding with the boy I was kissing, for accidentally cheating on my boyfriend and lying and just simply, purely being me; for me I get a settled pool of blood and the insistence but not the usual desire to stay in bed— now all I want is out and so I am not me.

I was wearing orange because we were lifeguards and when I saw him the next time we talked for the first time, again it was raining and he sat with me as my first seconds reeled forward: I reached to him and that was a beginning of conversations and laughing and train rides and we collided, our mouths radiating— mine warm and his certain— and that was a beginning of basements and our time. Things grew out, skimmed pretty as summer began to melt across the sky, to melt my skin tan as thin chapsticked lips always creased my cheeks. I laughed the whole time, it seems, giggling as I watched the sky and ocean collide at this end of the earth, let the waves roll over me and break me down but spit me out whole to live and breathe and move and radiate—until I was broken again in the air and on the warm wet cement, broken and torn from him while he was still in orange and I was hurt from the inside out just like I hurt another.

In this retelling of an accident and recovery, a young woman struggles to determine the next chapter of her life. We see the normalcy that was her life before the accident and the complicated situation that is her recovery. Through her innocent charm as she discusses her youthful love life, and her dreamlike and absurd rants, we learn about her wandering thoughts, in a body that is not yet ready to. “Bike Riding with a Boy”, by Anna Longo.

We started to bike to work, me and him, clicking and wheeling, zipping past cars and people and past Brooklyn, moving in straight lines and zig-zags down the pavement, the concrete, the paint.

         The last day we rode it was a Friday and was raining—the end of the afternoon it had stormed and so the beach had closed and we had all napped in the lifeguard shack and bummed around, useless. I was fizzy because the next day was my last at work and my parents weren’t home and he knew that and sitting in the shack, half asleep and damp, I could already picture the way it would happen, the way it had already happened with us up all night and the way he flattered me, “how am I supposed to sleep with you laying right next to me like that?” And even though it was raining I was lazy, slow, slipping down McDonald Avenue under the over-passing trains, my legs moving blurrily as I pedaled, continuously, dreading the hill up to Park Slope, not wanting to go up the hill and so maybe that was it, maybe that is why I can’t remember, why he had to turn around and see me like, what? Lying on the ground next to my bike because I said to myself over and over and over again I do not want to have to pedal up that big hill and then God heard me and the skies aligned over my head, the stars clicked and whirred together and I black out.

He always would just glance behind him, turn his head and see me and grin or nod slightly because I would be there because I would be there I would be there right behind him but he would always check and then he checked and I was gone and he had to figure it out, figure out where I had disappeared to and then he saw me curled on the ground, shaking foaming seizing, my eye darkening and my cheek swelling my head bleeding and he had to jump off his bike and grab me and wipe my mouth with his fingers, touch my lips like he had, place both palms on the side of my face like he had when I was beautiful, put his fingers on my jaw like he had. He had to fix me, to say my name say my name try to find me in this mess of bent bike tires and pounding hearts, because I was unconscious, dying, useless, Anna, Anna, Anna, Anna.

Patient could not express level of pain on pain scale.
Flag down on 18th avenue and McDonald for the pedestrian struck by motor vehicle while riding her bike. Patient was found on the ground.
Unable to follow simple questions; patient denies pain.
There is a right frontal epidural hematoma measuring 3x 1.5cm in size.

I do not remember anything and so it feels unreal. The only thing I remember from that day is throwing up in front of him and his mother who came to help because my parents were away. And then I do not remember, I only vaguely recall being pushed down hallways and around corners, groggy and incapable of being interested and so I remember only flashes of lights that wheeled in even lines past my head. And then, even when I was conscious I was crazy, coded, and confused. Doctors and nurses shone lights in my eyes and made me squeeze their fingers and take pills and say the date and the hospital and the president and my name and that was all I definitely got right: Barack Obama and Anna Longo. Everything else I shook my head and mumbled and only wanted to close my eyes. But as things became clearer I stopped making up stories but still slept all the time and I had hit my head hard, and I spoke stupidly in circles, just saying things in a roundabout, slow, muddling way but even so everyone still smiled and nodded as I grinned, trying to make a point.

The night before he was leaving to go to college in LA my ex-boyfriend of two weeks came to visit me in the hospital and he was scared by how dopey but sincere I seemed to be as I spilled soup all over myself. I kissed him, thoughtlessly and happily, my hair greasy and my right eye black like a maniac, adoring him with my words and apologies, doing anything to make him smile even though I had already left him.

Now I am home, now I am not going to college yet, now I am staying RIGHT HERE and I thought I was going to leave, I thought I was going to get out but I laughed so hard and all the air went to my head and so I just became a fool I am a fool I used to get everything I wanted but then I started throwing things away and so I threw my boyfriend away. The boy that I thought I had loved for three years; I threw him away because he loved too big too hard, too fast. He would always yell at me, blame me, break me, hold my body tight in his arms. My body that I honestly thought would be bruised if I stayed with him. Because the next time, he would love too big, too hard, too fast. So I left: because all I thought about was myself, maybe. and I couldn’t stay and I threw him away and even after I still got broken, and so it is my karma to accept these broken, bloody, fractured, scratched, bruised, delicate pieces and sit still with them, to let the stars and gods and universes leave me, frozen and still and silent and lonely as time ticks on and I sit still, my mind works and whirs even though everything else is paralyzed, paralyzed with fear and obedience and rules and guilt— the guilt drips through my veins like the IV, the guilt courses through me, this is my karma, this is my karma, this is my fate and so I obey, I internalize my sins.

I HAVE NOTHING. There is no other way to say it. I’m starting to trip to stutter to choke and I’m ticking— not like my watch and the seconds and my life moving forward— I’m ticking, my mind is stroking words, sounds phrases, sentences, and everything is just choking I am choking on this passivity to just let myself float on and be calm but I am not calm, I am not at college and I know no one I have no one I know nothing and there is nothing to break up my days, I am helpless— I found out today that he took care of me for hours when the nurses weren’t helping and I found out that they took all my clothes off, cut them off my incoherent body and drugged me and I was naked and vomiting and he was trying to cover me, to keep me covered but I was vomiting and he saw??? How helpless, how disgusting, how helpless I still am even though the blood pool in my brain resolves, I am not because I am still useless now, a broken body and a broken mind, I cannot cover my wounds and my hurts and my skin, my sandy skin he had seen it before but not like he had to help me and I would only want him to help me now, to touch me now if he wanted to but how can you want, after something like that HOW CAN I WANT after to just stay here and be nothing—

I am shapeless, shell-less, hopeless—

And it’s funny how the time just whirs on now,  meaningless seconds clicking on endlessly: I want to figure it all out, figure me out.

I am hopeless.

I was wearing orange. And then when I saw you—
Summer began to melt across the sky, to melt my one first lie into a million. My eyes opening wide and then squeezing shut tightly as I was hit by a car, smacked the hood, splattered on the pavement, my life stringing out precariously over a pool of blood and black and blues and the intensive care unit, my life spared, saved, set aside, my life put on pause, but my life spared and handed back to me.