My diet is bananas.

It’s been eight days since my accident.

I’ve been basking in the sun and soaking up love. And eating lots of bananas (pureed, of course.)

My boss sent me an email recently letting me know I’d get paid for the week. Sometimes, I find myself tearing up, not from the pain but because of the kindness people have shown me. I’m turning into a live, laugh, love bitch.

I am unable to show my genuine emotions. I look like a tortured, scabbed-up soul, yet my mental health hasn’t been this good in years. That must be what people who’ve found Jebus experience: this is enlightenment. Before my accident, the rational part of my brain was constantly battling the emotional part. I understood that my anxiety was a hindrance. I understood the power of positive thinking. I struggled to practice mindfulness. Why couldn’t my desire for peace and happiness override the part of my brain that refused to let go of despair? It took the impact of a car to fuse the two mindsets.

“I guess some people never change. Or, they quickly change and then quickly change back.” –Homer Simpson

Now, I can chill in the hammock my landlord set up in the backyard for me (!) and watch the bees for hours without manifesting new crises in my head.

Jordi hung out with me on Thursday evening. I had to resist every urge to flash my hillbillly grin. I was elated, but expressing my feelings was too painful. We watched several episodes from the seventh season of The Simpsons, which is agonizingly funny, except for the quote mentioned above.

I have also grown concerned about my left hand. The doctors and nurses kept asking about my swollen hand at the hospital.

“It’s fine.” I insisted while demonstrating its full range of motion.

Once the swelling went down, the bruises surfaced. I’m not new to Raynaud’s attacks. I would get them from holding a cold beverage for too long. Now, just drinking a smoothie is enough to trigger an attack, even if my left hand never touches the glass:

When I landed on my mouth, the tooth that came out tried exiting from the inside of my lower lip before I spat it onto the road. The wound quickly formed into a crimson papule: a traumatic fibroma. I had to push and hold down this papule with my tongue before sucking my meals through a straw. When I wasn’t drinking or eating, its rubbing against my cracked lower teeth was agonizing.

I emailed the dentist’s office on Monday evening requesting an emergency appointment to remove the papule. They squeezed me in the following afternoon. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get any other dental work done as my face was still swollen. I only cared about was getting rid of that awful lump of flesh.

The excision, which was done after injecting lidocaine in my lower lip, required three stitches. Years ago, during a tattoo touch-up appointment, I got my initials—LKVY—tattooed on the inside of my lower lip. I wasn’t expecting the tattoos to last, as they usually don’t. More than fifteen years later, my inner lip reads LK Y. The V got lopped off along with the papule.

I did not keep the papule: I never want to see it again. But the tooth I gave to some random Samaritan on Johnson Steet Bridge ended up in a specimen container and is now in my fridge. I took it for a photo shoot in my backyard.

It’s back in the fridge now. It will most likely never return to my mouth, and things aren’t looking good for its former tooth neighbour. I’ll find out its fate when I revisit the dentist this Wednesday.

Until then, I’ll be bee-watching and just being.