She fell hard from a higher place. It was an accident. With her younger brother and a childhood friend, she climbed over a big bed hanger and had fun pushing each other. And then she fell. Two stone planters broke. Dark reddish blood coloring pavements, all around the spread soils and her mother’s snake plants. Living worms scattered, wriggling on the iron flavor, some scrapped scalp, few strains of hair. Her head cracked a bit and stayed conscious toward a split-second view her falling body made.

Which street did her father take to bring her to the hospital? The doctor stitched the back of her head, while a nurse (maybe two?) held both of her hands. Crying was an intuition; she didn’t know whether she got anesthesia. For days, she could only sleep on her stomach, wet the pillows from midnight tears and toddler bladder that her mother refused to sleep beside her. She could not see the wound, nor daring to reach it. The gauze was wet and her hair smelled. Her playgroup class would miss her tomorrow—or wouldn’t they?

The memory is all too fuzzy for her now. A wound has long closed. Friends and family say the scar is still there yet so thin that it barely marks an old leak. She remembers the accident only in fragments. She no longer recognizes it as a major event of her childhood. Now it’s a mere swirl of an event out of her stormy growing up.

The thing is, without a new fall, she had collected more wounds marked on her skin: some from physical discipline, some are another clumsy accidents, some from lovers’ abuse, few self-inflict. Her tissues were cut and hit by asphalt road, glasses, leather belt, mattress thresher, tailoring wooden scale, hot motorcycle’s muffler, water steam, paper, someone’s hands, scissors, razor blade, fruit knife. Nothing is extremely serious, at least for her, that she needs to go to the hospital for intensive medical care. A few drops of betadine, or cold compressor and gel, or cute band-aid—they’re enough. Easy wounds, easy healing; her body is able to take those cuts and hits. She takes pride on the fact that she got them. The ones put on her by other people, she wears it as a parade. “Look at me, I’m cool. I survive. I’m not dead.”

She’s done with all tiny small injuries accumulated by the skin of his teens and twenties. She’s good enough, she thinks, that her blood clump together and clot as it is, that her growth factors do repairing stuff, that her dermis is alright. She is careful now, attentive to safety, and she keeps thinking about the back of her head. What’s up with the stitch? Well, nothing. It’s already healed.

But the fall feeling remains. The nausea out of spinning and circling, she loses her center of gravity and ground is no longer down here and up there. Everywhere is a corner pushing her to the edge of a room without a wall, ready to keep her at a tipping point of the world. She’s dangling, swinging to-and-fro, then falling by herself at her will. It’s a vertigo, a migraine, a headache, a dizzy,  photographic over-sense, flicking lights, round and round, again and again.

And she keeps wanting to make things up, abstracting her experiences out of broken memories and varying fragments to make meanings though not really, for the minutes of trying to not get her fingers burn from fire stove or not bumping her toes on the wall or table’s legs require her to collect consciousness of moving her body right for it doesn’t always synchronize with the mind. Turn right, she uttered “left” through her mouth, with some twitching nerves. So she wants to understand the discomfort that lingers behind her dry hair, the crack of a strain pinched out of millions nerve networks, buzzing without rest surrounding the mighty middle skull.

“Are you okay?” is an echo she hears when a friend sees her grabbing the back head as it starts pounding like a mini drum toy. “You look bad” is a sentence she hates so much for she knows to look bad is never an exceptional state, it’s the mundane. Her head, and the facial feature on one of its sides, is never alone. The front faces another and others, while her back stays through a scar. She jolts. Her spine tickles. She scratches again, searching for the scar she no longer feels. She longs for visible wounds as she cannot feel presence with untouchable dizziness. What objects should she hold? What nest should she ground her head on?

Her head, her back head . . . She wishes for a real accident, a cut, or another bump, or another scalp scratch, a small nick, anything. Anything for her head, her back head.