It hits you like a truck. In retrospect, maybe a few years later, you’ll recall it as a gradient--a gradual lapping of ideas starting from a careful consideration to a slow-paced crescendo to a forte of exclamation points punctuating your night sky with red flags that you cannot ignore. But the truth is that it hits you like a truck, like a big costco truck hauling furniture and fridges into the warehouse and you suddenly jump between the doors and the driver and you’re, well, hit.
But you can’t say you hadn’t seen the truck coming. You knew it was there, several yards away. Just like you contemplated the idea of Sarah as someone more than a friend. Just like you once thought maybe Jane liked you in a different way, the crimson blush heart palpitating kind of way. You brushed them off the table like insignificant pieces of dust. You didn’t know they were pieces of you trying to whisper to your brain for their attention.
You’re jarred. Pieces of you shamble to the ground, little shards everywhere on the streets. You scramble to glue yourself together, but you realize upon examining the little parts of you that the truck was right when it whispered to you from far away in the far abysses of the night as you stared to the infinite black plastered on your 3am ceiling; you aren’t who you always thought you are. You’re so much more.
Suddenly the world makes sense to you when that truck hits you. The sun shines brighter, the sky is bluer, maybe the leaves smell nicer on your way to class as you pass by the same big tree sitting in the middle of the field. It is suspicious. Maybe you’re seeing things. Maybe the world isn’t better or happier than it was before; maybe it’s just all in your head.
You keep some pieces of you in your pocket after the crash--pieces that you don’t glue together when you reconstruct yourself after the impact. You leave little holes in yourself just so that you could keep those few shards in your pocket, shards that you’ll rub your finger against in moments of solitude when you need to remember that maybe the brighter tint in Ellie’s blue eyes is not a figment of your imagination. You’ll look at your shards to remind you of the parts of you that you forgot about, the parts that you neglected, the parts that you didn’t know you had hidden inside of you all these years.
Maybe you don’t understand the shards that you hold. What about them compelled you to keep them in your hands and not back in the gaping holes in your left shoulder, your right thigh, the small of your back?
The world is too big and you are too small and you hold too many indecipherable universes for you to lift each shard up to the sky and examine them under the sunlight. You fear that maybe if you do, it’ll dissolve and you’ll lose it forever. But in your pocket they weigh you down, keep you on the ground, remind you of that day you were hit and the day you remembered who you were.
Their jagged edges scrape against your dry skin as you dive face-first into the world, armed with your forgotten pieces never to be forgotten again.