Experiencing Two Bodies

An Accident

When I was eleven years old my absolute love was my ten-speed bicycle. I lived in Stamford, CT at the time in a house my mother and I shared with my grandmother and two uncles in the suburb of Springdale. This area with its giant hills, swamps and treed alleyways was basically a kid paradise. I lived for bike rides and the feeling of the breeze on my skin…freeing me from the humid summer heat. My friend Kim (who lived down the street) and I spent the majority of our summers exploring on our bikes…letting them take us further than our feet could carry us into our world.

One day we decided to go to our friend Asante’s house. She lived further away than we were used to going. I hadn’t been to her house very many times so going gave me a sense of adventure…like traveling outside the familiar always does. We were riding down Asante’s street with Kim in the lead when I heard a car behind me. I looked over my shoulder to see where it was so that I could get out of the way and my front tire slid into a pot hole full of sand. I didn’t have time to catch myself, suddenly I was falling and my head literally bounced off the pavement after taking the brunt of the impact. This was the beginning of the weirdest event of my life.

Out and Back in Again

Let me first start out by saying that I lost some time during this incident; becoming lucid at the point where my body and my bike had been loaded into the back of an unfamiliar van. I could see dark faces, like shadows and hear my own voice asking, “Where am I?” and “What happened?” in a dazed an uncomprehending way. The van pulled up to my house. My Grandmother and mother were exiting my grandmother’s old Ford Fairmont; they had just gotten home from work. Upon inspecting me…they decided to drive me to the hospital and I was immediately loaded into the car.

My body was in the back seat but I was not…the trauma to my head had literally knocked me out of it. I became strangely aware for the first time throughout this experience that I was hovering over it, slightly to the right, almost as if I was sitting on my own shoulder. I calmly watched the scene unfold from my perch outside of myself. My body repeated the two questions of, “What happened?” and “Where am I?” My mother patiently answered them but her expression quickly turned haunted as my body paused for a moment and then asked them again and again. Her eyes wide with shock and fear sought reassurance from my grandmother who was driving. My grandmother leaned forward as she drove, silently and intensely willing the traffic in front of her to move…her knuckles were white on the steering wheel as she answered my mother’s gaze with the strong affirmation, “She’s going to be all right!” The look on her face was of such grim determination…that one could not miss the underlying message that said and don’t you dare think otherwise! My mother, knowing better than to question, turned her worried gaze toward the road.

Quickly I realized that I could not control my speech centers…I was hoping to communicate to them that I was o.k. or at least stop my body from asking the questions but I could not. I had no control over it whatsoever and as I gazed upon it…it was odd to me how useless it was without the rest of me (like a car with no one around to drive it)….I realized completely how separate my consciousness was and I wondered how it could be that I never noticed this before. A solid resolve came over me and I felt, I knew, that I had to go back…that there was more for me to do and that now was not the time to be separated from my body.

It was then that I re-entered my body…an audible snap filled my ears as I came to and found a bright light in my eyes. “Get that light out of my face…” I heard my own voice murmur as my hands instinctively brushed it away. “Oh, thank God she’s back!” My mother’s voice exclaimed in relief. The doctor who had been leaning over me with a flashlight trying to get my pupils to dilate moved away with satisfaction. “That’s quite the bump…you had us pretty worried there.” he said conversationally. I was blank for awhile; reaching up to touch the huge knot on the side of my head; fully experiencing the pain of my most recent physical experiences. Yeah…I thought quietly, reflectively to myself; knowing that I had just experienced something that I would never forget…

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