Particles of glass, so many that the earth might never be fully cleansed of them, fell like snow from my head. They caught the streetlight's syncopatic flicker and formed galaxies in the darkness beneath my feet. Wedged as I was, my face stuck to the wheel with so much blood, I considered falling into them. Perhaps if I closed my eyes and let the overwhelming sensation of fatigue take over, I'd keep sinking into this universe forever.
    Even as something ticked and wheezed beneath me, as metal groaned and air hissed, I marveled at the quiet. It was as if the world were holding it's breath in.
    My shoulders moved back, my neck resisted. My forehead came unstuck from it's long-held resting place with another twinkling of fragmented window. There was no pain in my body, only the stiffness of muscles held in rigor for minutes--certainly not hours. I touched my head, fearful to find jagged edges where my skull had cracked and splintered. But there was only a warm stickiness and a dull throbbing beneath my hairline. I pulled my fingers away and stared at them for a long time, not considering the redness of the blood but the twisted shape that was my hand.
    The knuckles were more pronounced, the digits longer. Calluses along my palms, fingernails no longer perpetually crusted with dirt, and a paleness that I had never known were all signs that this was not my limb. As whole and unmarked as my body parts were at that point, they may as well have been lying in the ditch nearby. Nothing was familiar.
    Later I told people that my memory began the moment I found myself hunched over the road, staring at the bent corpse of a car I did not recognize. I did not want them to know that I had sat in that cage and only wondered at the sight of my hands having grown older. I didn't want them to know I could remember anything at all.
    There were no sirens to welcome me home. No cars came, not even the sound of them in the distance. The road had two lanes and aging pavement, along a gravel embankment which I could only assume supported train tracks. Evergreen trees stood watch in the darkness, looming over the streetlight that my vehicle had embraced. The light died as I stood there, flickering out with some unseen gust of wind. One of it's brethren could be seen much further down the way, and another even further. The opposite direction only offered the night as company.
     My muscle memory returned as my hand reached into my jacket, out of habit more than necessity. I felt my hands perform simple gestures, too lost in shock to know the outcome. And then a cigarette dropped from my lips before I could light it, my own lack of volition revealed by the tiny flame of a lighter in my hand. I had never smoked before in my life. At least not in the life I could remember.
    I took the pack from my jacket again and stared at it, unable to make out much beyond color and shape in the gloom. I threw it into the woods with a conscious effort. I'd regret it later, when my body still craved what my mind couldn't fathom.
    Stumbling down the road, I was only conscious of a fading stiffness in my new body. The pain in my head was slightly less tolerable now that my heart had picked up tempo and caused the throbbing to increase. Where was I, temporally and spatially? The cold made each exhalation opaque for a moment, and the stars were dulled by the glow of distant cities. These perceptions were hardly clear enough for them to be a dream scape. Those places had always held a sense of hyper-reality for me. But even the lack of clarity was questionable; there was a flatness and stillness to my surroundings. As if this were all being played back for me, recorded on an oft-used videotape.
    I held my head against my hand and made my way for hours down the forgotten lane, down the strip of highway where cars passed me more quickly than they approached when I attempted to flag them down. Mile-markers passed me like sentinels in the dead grass, and I caught my first sight of a tree gone red with autumn's touch once I had given up gesturing to cars. It was the only color that seemed real--illuminated in the passing headlights. The green exit signs and the neon of an all-night roadside diner in the distance seemed far less extraordinary.
    The latter was a beacon, keeping me from collapsing into the ditch and falling asleep in a nest of fast food wrappers. It took a great deal of resolve to cross the borders of white-lined parking spaces and curbs. The door opened with a sweet rush of warmth and the aroma of burnt coffee.
    There were no welcomes in the eyes of the strangers within. Old men in billed hats froze, half-turned towards me. A waitress dropped a coffee-cup that refused to break, her hand flying up to her mouth. I stared at the date on the digital clock hanging behind the bar, and for a moment was ignorant to the disturbance I was causing as I tried to perform simple arithmetic. I had to confront the facts when I felt the gritty carpet land against my cheek, the feet appearing before my eyes swallowed up in black.
    Thirteen years, or something close to it. That's how far I'd traveled since the age of sixteen.

The hospital called me John Doe when they thought I was not listening, because in the first few days they had not yet found the car or a wallet in it to confirm half of their assumption. I was honest enough about not remembering, if not the fact that I knew my name. It was safer that way--after what the doctors had to say.
    "You did not suffer head trauma capable of inducing global amnesia. But your x-ray shows fragments in your brain. Most likely, from a bullet." I admired the doctor's sobriety as he told me this, his hands neatly crossed across his chart.
    "You mean I was shot in the head?" I asked.
    His face was unassuming. He must have seen a gallery of weird in this hospital's emergency room.
    "Not recently. The wound has been healed for some time. Most of the bullet was removed surgically, I suppose."
    I fumbled for the appropriate response, staring at my plastic wristband. I was just a number to it.
    "Is that why I can't remember anything from before?"
    He shrugged, almost breaking the professional facade.
    "It's more likely you have what we call post-traumatic amnesia. It's usually only temporary. But the fragments are in your right temporal lobe, which is known to have a role in memory storage. A fragment may have migrated due to your accident and caused more substantial damage. It is difficult to diagnosis you under the circumstances," he explained.
    I swallowed air, nodding slightly as if I were in agreement.
  "The good news is, the police may have a record of your . . . previous injury. They have already been contacted in regards to the car accident, but haven't given us any information on your identity as of yet."
    "Why haven't they sent anyone to speak with me?" I asked. I was uncomfortable lying here, under his scrutiny. "I want to leave."
    "We had to keep you under observation. And we can't let you leave. We're recommending you speak with one of our psychiatric staff."
    I clenched my hand, wondering at the sight of the muscles in the forearm as they shifted under the skin. There were blue marks beneath the scattering of dark hair--faded tattoos of the homemade variety. It sunk in then; a bullet to the head proving much more than a high speed crash on a lonely road. A cold sweat dampened my neck.
    "I'm not lying. Or a criminal. I can't remember, and I want to talk to the police." I stared the doctor down, hoping the expression I was forcing made me look serious enough. God knew it would have looked dumb on a kid.
    "I understand," he placated. His face was tired. "But you're going to have to wait. They'll want to speak with you nonetheless. I'll send a nurse in to check on you."
    He made his adieu, shoulders bent in a parody of normal posture. I was alone with soap operas on mute, a nondescript white light filtering in through 20-year-old curtains. I remembered hospitals as being far less mundane then this. The one or two times I had had to go, I could hear the screaming a mile away.