I have never been hit by a truck.

Yet I, like most people, for some reason can say what it feels like.

Imagine it. Walking out into the street, relaxed and unaware. Suddenly you are hit – you register the moment of impact in a daze. You feel metal on skin, on muscle, on bone. Shoulder shoved into its socket. Sternum cracked. Hips twisted and torn in the wrong direction. Knees bent into an awkward angle. Bones broken, fragmented, shattered. Insides ripped and mangled.

In that moment of impact, however, you don’t feel the pain. You feel the truck, see the pavement fly under you, hear the crunch of your bones breaking – but you don’t actually feel the pain.

Yet.

You hit the pavement, and it seems to break the spell. All the pain that was held at bay floods your body. You feel your shattered rib piercing your lung, your bowels filling with blood, your arms and legs folded unnaturally underneath you. You try to scream, but nothing comes out. Nothing but a whisper of a breath; your lungs have no air left to breathe with, much less make a sound.

So you lie there on the cold pavement, strangled by your own body, unable to move and unable to utter a sound. A tear leaks from your eye, and God, you just want to die, just let me die, please, let me die –

But you don’t. Your lungs are stubborn and keep breathing. Your heart is stubborn and keeps beating. Your eyes are stubborn and won’t close. Your mind is stubborn and won’t fade to black.

So you keep living. The doctors fix you up, slap a couple bandages over your wounds like their scratches. Like you didn’t just beg for death. Everyone rushing around, panicked, anxious, acting as though living after something like that is worth doing. Like everything won’t be changed.

Like you won’t always feel the wounds.

Like the scars will ever fade away.

Like you’ll ever be able to fight through the pain.

Every.

Single.

Day.

Yeah. I know what it feels like to be hit by a truck.