Did I die that day?

The office had vaulted ceilings with red maple beams, well-placed plants, and a mix of lived-in leather furniture and a couple of impeccably upholstered accent pieces. There was a heavy lacquered desk and an analogue clock and a vintage birdcage in the southwest corner of the room. The cage was empty and extraordinary.

I settled into a wingback chair that felt like an old friend.

“Orient yourself. Breathe. Be here now,” the energy worker said.

And I thought: But am I really? Am I really here now?

That is one thing about surviving a near-fatal accident: it can lead a person to question whether she actually did survive.

The moment it happened was the railroad switch between my seemingly real life and when I started playing house.

The before and after is memorialized in time as if a stamp was pressed upon a random page of a virgin passport. Before that, I had been in one place, but then I was somewhere else, and there is a record of when it happened.

After the time stamp, everything seems impermanent, like the life I thought was certain was actually made of colorful sand that could disintegrate in a breeze and flow down a river, transformed forever.

One afternoon, many moons later, it was as if the butterfly that had been fluttering around me ever since that fateful moment finally landed on my forearm and delivered the question I had always wanted to know the answer to:

“Did I actually die that day?”

If I had been killed, perhaps everything beyond that moment was merely a dream. Or perhaps this illusion of extra time was an elaborate gift or something I shouldn’t have borrowed, or worse yet, had I stolen it?

The ever-since had been iridescent, fragile like a bubble, illuminated but translucent. All these experiences could be relics of my imagination or remnants of my technicolor dreams. The ever-since felt like a movie, musical and edited, underscored with smooth transitions.

Maybe everything that mattered in the story happened after my violent death, or maybe it never happened at all.

Recently I asked my therapist of seventeen years what he thought. “Remember when that thing happened? Do you think it’s possible I died on impact?”

He lowered his glasses to the end of his nose, and looked over them towards me like a knowing father would. And he nodded.

Yes.

“Part of you did die, Nicole. Indeed, you did.”