They were driving, driving, driving.

It was the backroads, they were jumping hills.

David looked over at her and said something.

But what?

But what?

There was a loud crashing noise. A bang. A spark. Lines of red and flecks of grey and glass pouring down like rain, the crunch of plastic mixing with the crunch of metal, leather smell, ripped console, air bag expanding-imploding.

Her skin hurt and her face felt tight and the slam of the console thudded against her chest like being in the first row of a bass-heavy concert, and all the little sensations that were meant to form a straight lines separated into a graph with no correlation, and her thoughts became so disjointed as to merely be instincts and emotions rather than thoughts.

She blacked out.

She spent a long time blacked out, and learned some interesting things.

When she woke up, she was groggy, and could not place them.

She heard a beeping noise and turned her head and saw monitors and whiteness, sterility. It took a moment for her to process that she was in a hospital room, and that every ounce and inch and liter of her body ached in a dull, consistent way.

Her mother was there, and a nurse, and a doctor.

" Oh, Vida! We were so worried!" Her mother hugged her, and she groggily managed to half-hug her back, taken aback by the sudden gesture.

The nurse tapped her mother's shoulder and he motioned for her to lean back some. The doctor began speaking, but Vida still felt kind of weird and fucked up in the head and had trouble with bits and pieces of it.

" Several broken bones-" right, she got that, she definitely knew what that was all about- "Arterial tears and hemorrhaging-" that sounded vaguely like something to do with blood- " possible damage to the brain or central nervous system, need more scans to be sure-" Haha, what.

" What do you... mean?" she asked, feeling still asleep but also awake but also asleep.

The doctor looked over like he hadn't expected her to say anything.

" It's nothing serious, ...miss... Verlaine... You may just suffer some temporary memory loss, or your dreams may seem more real than your reality at times- it's hard to say with this kind of injury. This has, after all, been a traumatic experience."

... She couldn't remember what David had said to her.