SPOKE

SPOKE

An unforgettable experience occurred circa 1988 while I was living in Venice, California. I had moved out of the valley to the beach after high school and felt like a million bucks. I was riding my bike in a two-piece bathing suit with a paint splotch design of pink and gray, sported big hair, and wore large homemade earrings made of crystals. I was listening to Prince on my Walkman when I entered the intersection of Abbot Kinney from Westminster Avenue, when I was struck by a speeding car. The impact propelled me into the air. I must have flipped, because I landed on my face and right knee before hitting the street with the rest of my body. This was evident from my injuries. I didn't exactly suffer, because something miraculous happened that alleviated any pain that would normally be associated with an accident like this. In fact, it was mystical. It penetrated my memory with a divine sense of clarity that, even today, the event is as transparent as a fine blue sky.

Freedom can be a word interpreted both literally and figuratively. In this case, the extraordinary feeling of being free of the physical body was indeed both. I know it happened because after the impact and a silent pause amid the blackness, I began to see myself from a bird's eye view lying in the street. People started to gather around the broken and bloody body, slowly approaching as if afraid to get too close. This accident happened long before cell phones, so whoever called the paramedics remained a mystery. Nothing happened quickly. I was floating and slowly rising higher into the air. People who got close enough covered their faces in horror at the sight of a young woman with a smashed face and still as a corpse, so vulnerable in her bathing suit. I continued to rise, and the feeling was exhilarating. My mind was functioning just as it always had. I was still Angie. I was still the same girl I always had been, except that I felt a freedom that filled me with wonder. I felt no pain, unattached to my physical self. That body on the street wasn't me at all, just a form for me to inhabit. I was rising ever so slowly and felt no regret, no resentment, no anger, no sadness. I felt excited for whatever was going to happen next. All around me was a feeling of safety, love, and peace. I didn't even think of the word death.

I always enjoyed adventure. I was the kind of person who would turn a simple event into something fun—often risky, to the point of dangerous. I was a thrill seeker. But this experience didn't have the adventurous, "on the edge" feeling, I was already over the edge, untethered and pure soul. After that space of loftiness, I started to feel that I wasn't alone. I couldn't see anyone or anything other than the world below me, but I felt a presence. And not just a singular presence, but a unified multi-presence of sorts. A message entered my consciousness and silently said, "Not now, it is not your time." The "voice," for lack of a better term, said this with a gentle kindness I had never known before. Tranquility consumed me. I experienced conscious contact with a power greater than myself without a doubt. And even more, it loved me.

Not long after that, I suddenly awoke in my body. I didn't even have a chance to say goodbye. I opened my eyes to see a crowd that had gathered around me and pulled back in shock. I was alive. I wasn't a dead girl in the street after all. They started asking me questions. I couldn't talk because my face was ripped open at the mouth, through my cheek, exposing more of my teeth than one would care to see. My skull was exposed and blood colored my complexion. But my eyes were wide open, taking in the scene. The onlookers didn't know what to do as I blinked trying to prevent the blood from seeping into my eyes. I was amazed that I felt zero physical pain. I felt protected in a mystifying way, as if that presence was still with me.

Then the paramedics arrived and I vaguely remember being lifted onto a gurney and into the ambulance. I must have blacked out while riding to the hospital, because the next thing I remembered I was in the emergency room with a doctor flashing a light in my face. I still did not feel pain, because maybe they had injected drugs into me by that point. The next thing I knew my mother, who does not leave the San Fernando Valley if she can help it, arrived at Santa Monica Hospital and lifted the gauze that covered my facial wounds. She recoiled and gasped. "Do I look that bad?" I thought. I asked for a mirror. Upon reflection, I agreed: I did look pretty scary. But I couldn't be bothered with the implications of disfigurement because tranquility still consumed me. The doctor told my mother that they had called a plastic surgeon from Beverly Hills to see if he could come to help. He didn't charge a dime. I thought to myself, "Wow, that's a lucky break!" I didn't wake up until there were stitches in my face and a cast on my right leg, hip to ankle. It turns out that my kneecap had been shattered, and surgery was required to insert bolts, pins, and wire to hold it in place.

I healed in peace in my cozy studio a block from the Venice boardwalk. There I could listen to my Walkman, alongside the sand and shore, swaying on my crutches, watching the sunset. It was a good place to be. I had all I needed nearby: friends and neighbors out on the streets who could keep me company, coffee shops where I could read my poetry at open mic night, and lovers who still touched my banged-up body. And when I was lucky enough to get touched lovingly, I would drift to that place in the air and wonder why I wasn't finished here. Was it to see myself from a new perspective—perhaps as God would see me?

I had caught a glimpse of a great power, something awe-inspiring that almost welcomed me into a kind of blissful eternity. I settled on the presumption that I still had a lot to learn, and for me it would be the hard way. But that glimpse, that peek into what's next, has kept me seeking that sense of tranquility I had felt. I am grateful that this is a huge part of my life today. Every day, at the break of dawn I am awake, opening myself up to a conscious contact with the essence of life, with the God of my understanding. Every day, I meditate on the beingness of a human being, that element of us that is simply a part of the whole, a spoke in the wheel. As they say, the best things in life are free. Even further, I'd say the best thing in life is the freedom to be.