Dear Driver,

After the accident, many people came up to my car to see if I was okay. Yes, I reassured them. “Can anyone see my bag?” I asked. “It’s a small, rectangular leather purse. With a long strap.” Even though I was dangling inside my car, which itself lay on its side, so that both of us were fetal under the moon with every window busted in or out, my thoughts were whole. Yes, yes I have it here, said a man. The panic in the voices somehow locked me into a perverse calm. “Can you call my mom, please?” Yes what’s the number — what’s her name? And I was so tired. I could have slept there with glass shards shining all around me, with the seatbelt leashing me up by the hip. After the crash I was tired for three years.

My friend Annie and I sat in the ER waiting room for such a long time that I picked out most of the glass that had lodged in the laceration in my elbow. The single cut was the only bodily injury I sustained in the T-bone crash. My car, rolling first onto the driver’s side, then the roof, then coming to rest on the passenger side, bore the rest. When the nurse came to irrigate the wound, he said “Not much glass in there, actually.” And I said, “Yeah, I took care of it.” He huffed, like a laugh, and jokingly asked where I put the glass. “Sorry.” I said, becoming embarrassed; I had dropped all the pieces on the waiting room floor. He laughed again. Nurses must hear strange apologies all the time.

When the next doctor came, it was to stitch my elbow. I had a local anesthetic but still started crying immediately. Do you want to talk about it? she asked. What was her name? Stephanie? Suzanne?

Crying, I told her about the first time I was admitted to the ER. I was fourteen, and it was a routine appointment that distended into an overnight stay in the hospital because my blood pressure had read as a hypertensive crisis. When I look up what medications they may have put through my IV, they read nitroglycerin, nicardipine, hydralazine. The IV had to be attached to the back of my hand because the veins in my arm weren’t accessible. Is it because I have fat arms? I wanted to accuse, but didn’t ask. I just make problems for everybody I said to my parents after all the doctors left. It would be easier if I weren’t here. It would be cheaper. Wouldn’t it? I calmed myself by imagining the liquids traveling in my body: the clear medication irrupting into my skin; the water, salt, and oil of tears leaving my eyes.

As the ER doctor listened to my story she nodded and worked steadily at the suture. Time has dulled my memory of her exact words, but their meaning remains sharp: I can’t prove it to you, but you aren’t being a burden to me right now. In my elbow, the small, even threads and incisions of human care.

Dear Driver, I am confessing that when I opened my eyes to all of that shattered glass and crumpled metal, my thoughts were about my fear of inconveniencing others. My thoughts were not about you, because I am more selfish than I am kind. I did not wonder whether you were alive or dead, married or widowed, old or young. But I wonder now. Every time I glimpse the scar on my elbow, I wonder.

It’s too late to know, but I think I saw you sitting on the grass as I was led away from my car that night. If it was you, you looked terrified. Eyes wide and gaze distant, arms clinging to one another. If you saw me, there was no sense of recognition that I was the driver who nearly killed us both. I have to admit I am grateful if you don’t know my face. But I hope…what? Everything I want to say to you begins with the words, “I hope.” Because I do.

Kalani Padilla (all pronouns, @kp.scriv) is a Filipino-American and Kama’aina poet from Mililani, Hawai’i. Her waters are the Central Pacific, and the Clark Fork and Bitterroot rivers. Kalani holds degrees in Poetry and Theology from the University of Montana (MFA) and Whitworth University (MA; BA). Currently, Kalani tends home in Missoula, MT as a pastry chef and writing tutor. Kalani’s poems, essays, and short stories live with Bamboo Ridge Press, Waxwing, Waterwheel, Solstice, Poets.org, Poetry Northwest, Figure 1, and more.