For years after the accident I found myself inside the frame, a map of the backs of my hands. From outside you could see the frame for what it was (a slab of wood) but inside the frame was a table top holding up a white porcelain dish. Events out of order. Photos removed from an album. Outside time circled, shifted forward, but nothing inside the frame moved, not even the fly poised on the white surface of the dish, time unspooling like twine. The fly dead and hooked to take another life.

I entered the world as a miner emerges into the shock of mid-afternoon, trying to adjust to the light. Nothing about me made sense. My body was a photo negative where every sky was black, every tree covered with snow. My hands shook incessantly, charged with electricity. I couldn't shut myself off. My arms spilled whatever they tried to hold — a stack of books, a box of beads, a glass of water on every notebook. I tried to channel the me from before, the person who spoke two languages and knew the difference between them. Who used to roll her eyes at the slowness of the world, who used to run instead of walk. Now I was running backwards. Slamming to a halt.

The accident wasn’t always on my mind. Sometimes, listening to my friend discuss her custody battle or helping my daughter navigate a cadre of middle school bullies, it would drift below my consciousness, a barely perceptible hum. Once while reading my friend’s new thriller novel it completely left my mind for almost an hour while the heroine escaped, then managed to hunt down her kidnappers and kill them off one by one. But when the novel was over I found myself emerging from the blackout once again, pain flooding through me, then helplessness, my survival its own kind of suffering, a dumb luck with no satisfying end— just a random string of events from which I hang as from a thin thread, swinging.