I had a good friend – he and I had a falling out on a ride maybe eight months ago. We couldn’t see eye to eye on anything and it ended in frustrated shouts and screams in front of the Danville Peet’s coffee shop. He left on his bike, I stuck around just to establish my righteousness. I have tried for months to patch things up, even attempting to mend wounds with offers of homemade baked goodness. Things are coming around between us now and our interactions leave me on the edge of my seat, waiting to see what will happen next.

That is why when I thought I heard my friend’s voice shouting my name from across the street I was so distracted. I was commuting on my slick new mountain bike in downtown Berkeley when I thought I heard “Martina” shouted in the distinct voice of my estranged friend. As I was making a left hand turn onto a one way street, my head turned the opposite way of my direction, instinctively following the direction of the shout. I glanced quickly, but it was no one I knew; they weren’t even calling my name. Then I pummeled straight into a pedestrian as I was turning left and she stepped into the cross walk. We were at the intersection of Durant and Dana. I fell to the pavement instantly, my belongings strewn across the intersection, my limbs tangled with those of my victim. She was young Berkeley punkster, a Vivian Westwood wannabe, her tight black punk jeans barely wrapping the circumference of her unmuscularly svelte legs. Somehow our bodies had intertwined themselves so quickly upon impact that initially I could barely recognize which legs belonged to her and which belonged to me. The image of our tangled limbs is matted and framed in my mind by the thick white lines of the cross walk – the scene of the incident.

As if in slow motion, I finally looked to her face and she glared back at me. Both of us looked to each other to determine our post-collision feelings. I have crashed my bike before, all too frequently in fact. But this was probably a new experience for the other girl. I should have taken more responsibility, more lead; instead I just looked at her and awaited her response to being run over by a mountain bike. The collision of her and me, legs, arms, belongings, everything happened so quickly; it was almost a spontaneous synthesis of two people and one bike. But the detangling of “us” seemed to happen in slow motion, reminding me of a pile of “Pick Up Sticks” where one stick is slowly pulled out from the bottom of many overlapping ones.

Finally she said “I am sorry” and began to pick herself up, collect her belongings, and brush off. I was shocked. In our strange occurrence, in my delay to show emotions or communicate, she had assumed the fault for this! I quickly uttered my apologies as well and asked if she was hurt. She wasn’t and then she high-tailed it out of the intersection as I remounted my mountain bike and peddled up the up the road in a daze.