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 The day I discovered Audrey Hepburn in the tile of my bathroom floor was the same day my rounding nurse nigh on caught me killing myself. With little mobility left in either hand, it was difficult to hold a sharp object steady enough to slice open my wrists effectively, but I was not content to ingest a months-worth of painkillers. I was hungry from something more; I wanted to feel death drain from my face as the crimson life pooled together in the cracks between the tiles. My crippled body was my plague, and I was not content to sleep through my death. I wanted to experience its defeat. In this way, the pain was gratifying. The bathroom floor was cold as almost all bathroom floors are; linoleum is not a heat conductor, but the more I bled, the less I noticed the temperature. 

“Why don’t you just take a cab, or the subway,” my mother had asked me more than a hundred weeks earlier; years never seem as long as when they are described in months or days. To say that I had spent two-years in the physical therapy rehabilitation unit of the San Marco Good Samaritan Hospital arguably had far less impact than saying that I had spent 100 weeks or 730 days trying to walk again. I suppose that’s why mothers tell their child’s age in months rather than years and why fish are measured by arms-length rather than in inches. 

“It’s raining awful hard out there. You’re going to catch your death if you try riding your bike in this weather.”

“I’ll be fine mom. I can’t afford a cab and I missed the subway three minutes ago plus getting there. People ride bikes in the rain every day,” I had told her. 

It’s funny how words slip from your mouth sometimes, almost as if you’re trying to warn yourself that something’s about to happen. I could not have told you that morning that I would be hit by a 1998 red Lincoln Navigator, shattering six bones between my two legs, and four more in my arms, but my mouth surely could have. I have often wondered if there were in fact some mighty Murphy law-keeper who lurked about, fork and knife in hand, waiting for a chance to make you dine on words like, “People ride bikes in the rain every day and don’t get hurt.” I hadn’t actually said the last part of the sentence, but somehow he knew I had thought it.

The weeks following the accident were filled with cliché phrases that nearly made me want to bite my tongue off to keep from blurting out mean and hateful retorts. Somehow when you’ve lost the use of both legs and arms things like, “you were lucky you were wearing your helmet,” and “look on the bright side; things could have been a lot worse” and “you’re lucky to be alive,” provide little comfort and provoke no gratitude despite their good intent. I suppose that spending hours pinned between a burning engine and an industrial-size garbage can, waiting to be cut free by the local fire department, had left more scar tissue inside of me than the burns across my chest from the grill of the car that now left me partially paralyzed and unable to write my own name. 

My lips were beginning to go numb. This did not surprise me much as I could easily follow the logical bread crumbs that affirmed the fact that if there was more blood on the floor than in my body, there was a good chance there wasn’t enough to warm my lips nor limbs; my fingers too, now a violet shade of blue, were beginning to lose sensation. This type of logic reminded me of 8^th grade algebra story problems: if you spend eight-weeks in a body-cast and six-weeks in four smaller casts, how long will it take until you are able to scratch your own nose again?  

The past two years had waned on me. The degradation of having my ass, and even more private places, wiped and washed by