Your phone screen shatters on impact.
This is the first thing you think about. Not your collarbone, which has snapped clean; not the airbag’s chemical smell still burning inside your nose. The phone. You think: all those pictures.
The paramedic has your wrist. She keeps asking if you know where you are, and you say yes; you say the intersection, the name of the road, though what you mean is: I know exactly where I am. I have been here before. You have been in this particular dark for months. Since January. Since the hospital room where your father’s hands looked like something borrowed from another body — someone thicker, heavier, someone who still had time.
You had been, before the other car ran the light, composing a text to your sister.
How do I tell her the truth? You were thinking, one thumb over the keypad. The truth being: You haven’t cried yet. The truth being: You drove to his apartment on Tuesday and sat in the parking lot for forty minutes and drove home. The truth being: You think you have been in a crash for six months and you only just now felt the impact.
The paramedic says, Stay with me. She says it the way people have been saying it — at the funeral, at the dinners after, in the careful voices of friends who don’t know what a body is supposed to do with this much nothing. Stay with me. As if you might decide to leave.
Your collarbone is broken. Your phone is broken. The car is deformed.
Later, your sister will drive three hours and sit beside your hospital bed and not say the right thing and say the right thing. She will put her hand over yours the way your father put his hand over yours that last afternoon — as if you were a phone screen, already cracked, that he was afraid to press too hard.
You had been trying to reach her.
You had the words almost ready.