Call Me "Die Hard"

I don't have a great memory, but I do remember lying curled on the street with wincing pain gripping my back, thinking I must be paralyzed. With relief, I circled my feet on my ankles, and repeated, only half-convinced, "You're going to be OK."

Seconds earlier, I had coasted toward the light, a soft breeze raising goose bumps on my bare arms, and thought how glad I was to be headed to work so early. A red blur streaked to my left, and a red car turned into my path. Even as I tried to veer to the right, I sensed, already out of body, a panel of metal colliding with my bike. I do not remember the shock of impact or what happened next, falling from my bike and landing on the street close to the curb at Northeast 15th Avenue and Prescott Street.

Twenty minutes earlier, I'd been a determined 27-year-old, not invincible, but sure of my strength. I ran every day to make up for a chocolate addiction and biked to work because it got my heart beating. Does all this change now, I wondered, at eight in the morning, lying splayed in the middle of traffic?

A pair of shell-toed black leather work shoes walked up and stopped before my face. Above them stood a man who'd parked his red Chevy down the street. I yelled up that my back hurt, and the man told me not to move. It was the only thing he ever said to me.

Other voices arrived, and I strained to yell that the man had hit me. But he snapped back to the gathering crowd that I had hit him. "There's a human body on the ground," a woman responded.