And so it begins...

At the time, I didn’t know what it meant.  I didn’t know what the fact that his murdering uncle was let out of jail to come to the hospital to see him meant.  That it meant that he might not wake up.  That it meant that he was coming, with police escort, to say goodbye to his nephew.  In the haze that was my youth, my fear, my exhaustion, it didn’t add up.  It was probably better that way. 

Those many hours in the hospital, they are like a dream now.  That was me.  That was my life.  But time has, thankfully, blurred those edges, and made them bearable to recollect.  Barely.  The hindsight, though, in as much as it is enlightening, is painful because I see the mistakes so clearly behind the lens I see through now.  Thank goodness for good prescription glasses.

I was 18.  Just a kid.  Oh, but I was grown up.  Mature.  Smoking menthol cigarettes and everything; trying to leave behind the smart girl stereotype.  The stereotype that I now love and embrace behind my glasses.  He was 22.  An older man.  Oh, the mystique.  And the drama.  He played the guitar like Jeff Healey.  He listened to Enigma and Joe Satriani, and he let me play my George Michael tapes in his tape player.  He was a geek, and a daredevil, and I loved him.  I loved that he pushed boundaries and made people dislike him purposefully.  I loved that he liked me. 

I smoked my first joint with him.  And I dropped mushrooms for the first time with him, too.  It wasn’t just doing drugs.  It was enlightenment.  Right?  Sure.  Sure, it was.  Whatever.  We did drugs, and I liked it.  But I’m digressing.  That’s not what this story is about.  Well, maybe the background will be useful to you.  Whoever you are.  Anyways.  Back to the point.

He was a daredevil, and that trait is where I’ll begin this story.  We were mountain biking out in the middle of nowhere near a small town where we were visiting his French exchange student friend.  I was so jealous of her, with her dark hair, her olive skin, and her French accent; such a contrast from my boring blonde, blue eyed self..  He’d had a thing for her once, and I could see why.  She was beautiful, she was confident, she was exotic.  She was all the things that I wasn’t.   And we were visiting her and mountain biking in the bush.  There was this hill.  It was a really steep hill covered in loose shale rock.  I don’t know that it was actually shale; I couldn’t identify rock types back then.  But, based on my memory and what I know now, I think shale is moderately accurate.  The hill was not on our path.  It was out of our way, but he spotted it.  And he wanted to bike down it.  And so he did.  He carted his bike up that hill on his shoulder till he was at the top, looking down at us all.  There were five of us in total, I think.  The French girl, her boyfriend, the skater dude, him, and me.  The four of us looked up at him, watching, waiting.  He climbed on his bike, clicked his feet into his pedals, and down he came.   Partway down the hill things went terribly wrong.  There were big rocks on that hill, and rocks that slipped and slid and changed his path too quickly.  Quick so that he couldn’t correct himself. 

What happened next is burned into my brain like it happened in slow motion, even though it was over in seconds, surely.    His hands came off the handle bars, and his body flew up and over the bars, all the while, his feet were still attached to his pedals.  Gravity brought his body back down to the earth, his thigh connecting with the handlebar of the bike, and then everything speeds back up into real time in my memory.  There is this terrible crashing, and rocks went flying and his body tumbled down to the bottom of the hill.  We rushed to him while he screamed, “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!” over and over.  Let’s be clear, he wasn’t a Frenchman.  Maybe that behavior in the face of what had just taken place should have been a sign to me as to his feelings for the French girl, but at the time, I was more concerned about the unnatural angle of his leg than his choice of profanity.   I had no first aid training, I had no idea what to do.  I was, however, fairly certain that an unbroken leg could not lie at the angle that his did.  He was in agony, that much was also clear.  We sent the skater dude on his way for help, and the rest of us sat there with him, murmuring whatever calming, consoling words we could, in our panic, come up with.  The French girl spoke in French to him, and that calmed him significantly.