Today is the 32nd anniversary of the day I got hit by not one, but two cars — and somehow stayed among the living.

I don’t remember the impact. Just crossing the street. Not the sound. Not the moment my body met metal. My mind keeps that door locked. What I do remember is waking up in a hospital bed, pulled back into the world by fluorescent lights, antiseptic air, and the strange realization that I was in the hospital.

But the pain…..

It wasn’t just regular pain—it was a roll call. My head pulsated as if a bomb had detonated in my skull, and my left leg howled with rage. Incoherent with pain, I fought the doctors until I was shot full of morphine. Then I started singing like a canary and told the doctors my identity. That’s the only part of my experience I remember.

I’ve been told what happened by a police report. Crossing the street. A strike. My head cracking against a windshield. My body thrown. My left leg caught and twisted in the wheel. A chain of violent physics and fragile flesh. But those are facts on paper, not scenes in my mind. My memory begins at survival.

There is something eerie and sacred about that — like being given a second life without having to watch the first one end.

Some people carry trauma as vivid pictures. Mine arrived as absence. A missing reel of film. A gap in the record where the needle lifted and never dropped back down. And still, the body remembers in its own language — the ten inch scar on my leg, the metal rod on the inside, the aches, caution, gratitude.

Thirty-two years have grown on the other side of that blank space. Books read. Children raised. Tears shed. Laughs earned. Words written. Love given and received. A whole library of living built after a chapter I never had to reread.

Thirty-two years later, I walk with the knowledge that I was not guaranteed this stretch of years. Every laugh, every book, every grandchild’s smile, every sentence I write sits on top of that moment like a house built on a fault line that decided not to break.

I was only twenty-three years old when that accident happened. Just twenty-three — still new to adulthood, still figuring out my footing in the world. My children were almost two and almost seven. Babies, really. Soft-voiced, small-handed, still reaching up instead of out.

If I had died that day, they would carry only the faintest shadows of me — a voice half-remembered, a face blurred by time, a story told by other people instead of lived with their mother in the room.

And my baby girl wouldn’t have been born at all. Her laugh, her presence, her whole bright existence — erased before it ever had a chance to arrive.

I wouldn’t have met my grandbabies — my precious little brown browns.

Those sweet faces, those bright eyes, those voices calling my name — all of that would have been unwritten music. No hugs around my neck. No small hands in mine.

That’s the part that humbles me straight to the bone. Survival didn’t just keep me here. It kept a whole future here. A whole branch of the family tree that was still just a thought in the mind of tomorrow.

I don’t remember the accident.

I remember the afterward.

And the afterward is still unfolding.
I am here. That is the miracle line.
I don’t celebrate the accident. I honor the survival.

Some people count birthdays. I also count the day the street tried to keep me — and failed.

I am still here. And that still means something.