“Is there anyone we can call?” the EMT asks, standing over me as I raise a shaky hand to my left collarbone and feel the bulge that shouldn’t be there. I am sitting on the pavement, my Madewell jeans now covered by a long black streak down the left leg, still wearing my motorcycle helmet. My elbow is shattered into three pieces, and the pain radiates down my arm to my pinky and ring finger, where my wedding band always used to be.
“No, there’s no one. I have no one!”
I panic about who will take my elderly, rescued basset hound for her bedtime walk if I go to the emergency room. I look over at my Vespa — an impractical divorce gift to myself — laying on her side with huge dents and scuffs ruining her beautiful mint green body. My phone and rainbow pride keychain are trapped in the storage compartment under the tan leather seat.
Just a few months before, after undergoing ketamine treatments as a last-ditch effort to ameliorate my relentless existential depression, I told my husband that I couldn’t be married to him anymore because I was meant to be with a woman. Now I am desperately alone in the back of an ambulance experiencing a cataclysmic life event. And yet a feel...
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