Seventy Times 7
“I hope there’s ice on all the roads
and you can think of me when you forget your seat belt
and again when your head goes through the windshield”
on repeat in my head as I stare at the silver ceiling laid strapped on the hard neon orange plastic safely bolted to the floor of the ambulance carrying me to South Shore Hospital.
My head hits the windshield.
I polietly thank the kind older woman who happened to be jogging by with her walkman and oversized red jacket for offering a clean tissue pulled from her fanny pack for the blood staining my forehead and the man who lives in Lila’s old house whose face I recognize from work for offering to let us inside while waiting for assistance.
I recognize and appreciate your humanity, but lets not pretend the benevolence will extend any further than this moment.
My heart barely skips a beat when I see my hair entrapped in the web of broken glass as I return to the scene to retrieve my last cigarette and new robin’s egg blue baby Bic. I am entirely too calm.
I puff on my cigarette as if it were my seventh in the day (which in all likeliness it could have been), with no satisfaction or relief, more out of habit than anything.
blues and whites flashing just up the hill-
“No, don’t worry, it’s gonna be fine”
Typical Scituate Cop: reaches into my sister’s bag, lifts out her prescription bottle
“Um, yeah, that’s hers… but we just crashed a car.”
All I can smell is gas. I just put twenty fucking bucks in the tank.
Why won’t the fucking horn just stop already?
Why can’t I care?
