Hit. And. Run.

I couldn't sleep due to the inexplicable smell of burnt marshmallow. Then I was crying. Then I remembered why I was crying: because I watched a man get run over by a car.

I was in my car, at a stoplight, a pedestrian crossed in front of me, not five feet away. A car peeled away from the curb on the cross street, driver's door swinging open still, the car veered sharply into the crosswalk. The pedestrian was hit, sucked under, and run over by front wheel. Crunch. Back wheel. Crunch.

Moments of emergency become hard crystalline structures, they obstruct the malleable flow of the mind. Shock.

Images when I close my eyes. The way a body flails.

He was 'conscious' when I got out of the car, people rushed in, his friend pulled on his arm, tried to pick him up, we shouted to stop moving him.

"Someone just jacked that car and hit that guy!" I heard someone say, "He just jumped into that car and stole it and hit that guy."

People took off their coats and made pillows and blankets, called 911. Cared.

I moved my car out of the way of incoming emergency vehicles and sat, shaking and shocked.

I said the world is broken. But the world isn't broken. Not more, not less. Just more of the same. Just more people stealing cars, running people over.

I said, the world is broken. But what I meant was, I am broken. A piece of me broke that night two weeks ago. A piece of me broke and fell into the pile of broken pieces that I carry with me everywhere.

It feels like I am floating most of the time, flying sometimes. My feet barely touch the ground. But every time part of me breaks it stops flying, becomes heavy, something I must carry. A collection of shards that we all share.

Someone ran over someone else and kept driving. And I cannot imagine how awful that would feel, and how much closing off and denying of myself I would have to do to be able to carry on about my days after doing something like that, or how awful life would be if I was stealing cars and killing people. My heart skips a few beats and I am so sad. And I want to love them, and show them they are loved, and worthy of love and that life is hard without making it harder for yourself and other people. And I want to show you that you are worthy of love, and that love is energy, not a romantic notion, and that energy is what makes up everything that we are, and were, and will be. And that no one is beneath love, because they are love, and love is energy, and energy is everything.

I feel like I have run over a man in the crosswalk. And that breaks me. And I feel like I was run over by a car, which breaks me. It hardly matters that my body was not in that car, and not on that pavement, because I feel it all.

And it feels like floating, and falling. And it feels like carrying broken pieces.

And it smells like burnt marshmallow.