Today, I’m feeling less like a ghost.
When I rolled my car on the freeway;
with my hands on the wheel and my heart
sitting in the passenger seat.
that night, we didn’t die in the hands of a machine-
the crushed metal didn’t engulf us
into a well oiled esophagus;
instead, we walked away.
The morning after the accident,
my girlfriend wakes up crying
from the pain of sutures on two fingers.
we havent slept enough without feeling
the physics.
Somewhere in that crash, I thought
I’d left my body
still suspended upside down.
Hopefully they can get my baby out
but I might have stopped breathing.
how are we alive?
We weren’t supposed to walk away from this.
My mother told me:
a few days before
she had doused my car in the holy water
she received from a monk.
We had prayers guiding us;
I felt my ancestors.
I knew we’d be safe.
I keep replaying alternate endings.
my body reacts to them
the way fingers do to a hot plate.
my stomach drops, and the other organs
rearrange themselves accordingly.
When i’m out in the world,
I feel my interactions with people
in third person.
my hands are fading like a time traveler
watching their birth go wrong.
all things could have gone wrong.
so how am i not a ghost?
