Dear “Lori Ann White, 41, of Silsbee,”

I forgive you is what I should’ve said when you walked over to me and said, “I’m so sorry.”

I remember your face as clearly as I remember my arms, how chunks of flesh were mysteriously gone leaving melon baller shapes.

It’s the collision I forget, but your eyes wide, reflecting the shreds of my ear all butchered up like hamburger meat, I’ve recollected just fine.

I guess I’ll never be able to recall how I got to be horizontal on the highway, cold rain diluting the warm blood pooling on the asphalt, but I’ll always think back to your hair, how your long braid dangled as you bent over me.

It’s ghoulish how the memory of you has stood unscathed in the churning of the past 10 years, which is why when the Houston Chronicle article I found just yesterday—the one saying how I was “more fortunate” because my ear had been reattached—called you by name, I —

I never knew you as Lori with age and place, only as the woman who said sorry before I or my parents or the investigators or the lawyers thought to use the word blame.

What I’m trying to say is I know it wasn’t your fault you swerved, lost control of the bus. You couldn’t have known the debris was harmless, practically weightless, was

 

foam.

 

Lucky

She would have fucked him had her dad not been awake,
ripped open the truck door and said, Get your ass inside.

She’d slept with him before in the Ferguson’s pool house,
the smell of Evan Williams making syrup of the air.

This time cheap vodka, Sonic Strawberry Limeade leaving
pink chunks on the Uggs she’d try to clean the next day.

He’d been one of many attempts at absolving herself,
in her warped body but no longer experiencing zero to ten pain.

Pulled from the wreckage, receptacle for words like strong and brave,
she recited her lines when prompted, his fingers hesitating over a scar—

I’m one of the lucky ones. So thankful to still be alive.
Her name means God’s Princess, according to the ceramic heart

suspended from pink ribbon, cracked but still nailed to the bedroom wall.
The heart quivered each time I escaped over the sill and under the pane.