The Accident

It wasn’t much of an accident, but it gave me every ounce of conviction that Pattaya, Chonburi, perhaps even Thailand (although I will wait to make that conjecture) does not want me here and will do everything in its power to get me out.  The gods are trying to dispel me.  Not the goddesses because I envision them using softer undertones, like gently pushing me out, while these men with spears and face tattoos are shoving me in the dust, throwing tears in my face and keeping me up at night with this long ago familiar fear that I will wake up suddenly to a vision, or a real life threat of a man standing alone in my room, at my feet, near my door, or over my body.  These gods are vicious. 

I have suddenly grown tired and the recent shock to my body has made it hard to walk and impossible to bathe myself without getting my bandages wet.  I have little options in my apartment for sitting, so I lay in bed, sleeping because I need it, because night time now frightens me and I now sleep during the day, or because it hurts to walk downstairs and get something to eat, so I sleep as to only eat two meals daily.  A brilliantly malnutritious plan.  The accident allows for me to have painkillers so now coupled with the emotional and memorial pain that I endure I now have physical pain, something I thought I could bypass while being here.  The painkillers don’t do much because now parts of my skin have literally turned inside out, or disappeared underneath the motorbike outside of the mall on that fateful Wednesday, leaving me looking, as Jenna put it, like I had been attacked by a dinosaur.  She didn’t look so great either as we slithered along the melting streets looking for refuge, or at least eye contact, trying to hold our helmets, our wallets, and our pride while our eyes were having a hard time adjusting to the weight of our tears and the sting of the exhaust of cars passing by us. 

We got up quickly after we swerved and fell to the ground, hitting it with the loud thud that I would so often hear the first time I learned how to ride a bike; the thud of body against asphalt, of elbow and knee against gravel and the shock and immediate relief felt in knowing that I was wearing a helmet.  This hurt a tad bit more than that…maybe because my dignity flew out from beneath me and gently flitted away, laughing and pointing silently as if to remind me that if ever there was a piercing hot moment in Pattaya where I would hate these people for not even looking my way, this would be it.  Sure enough, one person said one word, and after that, no one said anything.  People stopped to look at us walking to the medical clinic but their mouths were unfortunately sewn shut with the common affliction that weakens a town who lives in abject trauma.  So we staggered to a clinic, the dirt and blood crumbling off our bodies like a woken war-time statue who slumbers in an intermittently agonizing sleep (the sleep I now call home) but the clinic was closed.  We ironically took a motorbike taxi to the hospital where I got my arm X-rayed and my wounds cleaned.  One of the X-ray technicians took out her personal camera and began snapping photos of me in the X-ray room.  It made me laugh, wondering what she would tell her family when she got home.

I felt as though someone has hammered their way through my body, trying to chisel it into something it’s not and taking bits and pieces of my skin as souvenirs.  I still feel that way through my small recovery process.  Needless to say, I have to go back to the hospital every day for seven days to get my bandages changed (on my elbows and knees), thus prolonging my escape even further.  Not having all my skin on these parts of my body has been undoubtedly more painful than I could ever imagine.  I’m not supposed to shower for a week because the bandages can’t get wet (I tried to shower the other day and it took me fifteen minutes to wash my hair…upside down, without getting my legs or my arms wet).  My new skin gets rubbed off of me each time I go to the hospital, and the nurses tell me that it’s dead skin that needs to go.  I wish they would leave it on me, because it is absolutely excruciating when they put the alcohol on my pink flesh and peel away the newly formed layer of skin.  I guess it’s necessary; to constantly peel away the layers until a wound is finally healed to allow for the proper growth to take place.  The one thing I am grateful for is that this allows me to rest.  I can’t sleep at night which is alright because I can read and because dawn always comes early.  I can’t wait to heal, then leave, and heal some more.