1 year since the first break (which was a “first-ever” soon to be, only months later, also a “first-that-year”)–L MB above, the one with a metal plate and eleven screws. 1 year since someone who could barely skate skated out onto the rink thinking she’d be a Roller Derby Queen–Rogue Won, a name I never got to claim–and tried a 180° turn when she could barely take the curve on the track. “What Is” turns on a dime, on four wheels–up one second, on the ground the next–and in that dime, on those four wheels, a lifetime, a slow-motion flash of a single starburst against a suddenly black-screen world–pain’s excess translated into a picture because the reality is a bit much, as they say. Same starburst-against-black as with my ACL back in my Intramural Basketball days and I knew, I knew it was bad–I thought, this is real, this isn’t happening, but it was–and I was still up and there was nowhere to go for a second but down, down on the same ankle…you can imagine. Then–forever, a second later—I fell. Then Little Murdermaid skated over, laughing, ready to cheer me on and get me back up, thinking it was just me falling again. And, barely looking at it out of the corner of my eye (cause when I’d looked before it seemed like my leg ended at my ankle and that image didn’t really compute), I said, deadpan and telling myself to breathe to be calm to not be that person, “I don’t think that’s normal.” She didn’t get it. So I pointed this time, looked at it myself for emphasis–it still didn’t compute but I knew and I said, “That’s not normal.” She said, “I’ll call the ambulance.” I said, “OK.”

One turn. Up one second, down the next. And life is never more real–reality never more felt–than in those moments where What Is shifts the simplest nanonothing into What Is. And the pain is nothing compared to the loss of…no, to the reminder that you never had control and the knowing–in your bones, broken or not–that there is no going back just that second (not even when it’s still one second, not even when it’s only five minutes, and certainly not when it’s 1 year later and going back doesn’t seem to matter so much as going forward). Time–that they say isn’t linear, that they say bends and spirals and plays and whatever else–is never more obvious, more powerful, more unyielding, more ridiculous than when This Is Happening while your mind insists It’s Not.

It’s good to be here–1 year later where the aftershocks of that knowing are less often and less real. These words are a starburst. Some black marks across a white page that translate the excess, the accessible, but not the moment, the reality, the knowing itself. That which can only be felt in living the shift from This to This.

Like when you step in a hole….but that’s a remembering for another time.