A woman has just left the local Asian market with mango mochi in her bag. She is satisfied with her ambiguous dessert, and justifies her choice by claiming that the shift in texture from rice flour gelatin to ice cream is itself arousing. An interesting experience after all.

It’s not far from the apartment she’s been living in for four months now, which is just a hallway with five rooms attached like the arms of a starfish. The sun is low, it is close to seven in the evening. There are students with unintelligible accents flitting by, aiming for a good table at the pub trivia. She is marginally jealous of them and all the things they seem to have to do, but becomes preoccupied with the concern that her German roommate will be meandering in the kitchen later tonight, at the time she planned to eat the mochi.

She can’t just yet. A bar must be gone to, to say goodbye to a good friend. A good new friend, with a name that contained everything one needed to know about her. This friend moved with conviction. Her knees never faltered. Tomorrow she would be gone to a different place, and with her would go the past four months of life. The mochi woman felt that this was too soon, regretted her lack of immediate nostalgia. She had not been reflective recently. She exited experiences like one stumbles away from a rollercoaster, ineffably satisfied. Unwilling to think about this issue further, the woman plays music through her refrigerator headphones.

By the time the bar is in sight, she really wants the mochi. The pieces are warm now and even melting. They are probably the perfect texture, at this very moment. Descending a steep hill, she battles the urge to reach into the bag and take them out. Her hand fiddles with the zipper, tantalizing.

Presently something is happening behind her. There are several vehicles parked on the side of the road on this very steep hill. They are sort of in her way, slightly up on the sidewalk to leave enough space in the center of the road. She maneuvers around them and is a few feet away from the bar’s entrance at last. Now there is a van with a loose emergency brake. It begins to roll. After several seconds of picking up speed, the van hits her from behind. She is motionless for the duration of the impact, but ends up in a very different and very exciting position. Lying laterally on the road now, her right leg is run over. She screams things like “Help!”, but not “Help me!”.

The mochi woman is enduring something unique. A number of things have violently departed from her. The headphones have flown off, landing twenty feet away but somehow still intact. That was culture. It could never encompass her in that very position at that very moment. Never. All her questions like; what is my essence; what is my ideology; what is my mentor; what is my reference; go to die. They have never felt what she is feeling, which is some sort of multifarious buzz. Multifarious bug. It’s crawling. It’s a tick. She is sort of like Emerson in the woods. Her life is suddenly for itself, not for a spectacle. 

Her green journal goes too, with all of her attempts at documentation. That was her own self. One pancake face looming above her says something like, “Deary me! An American television star, with an eyebrow piercing!” This is an exciting statement that incites good thoughts for the study-abroad liberal arts student who is face down on the road. If she were to be dying, who would it be for? What she had been before was not a being-toward-death. She was a modern girl, all the time pointlessly current, she had not apprehended death. Now, her exact quality of mortality is irreplaceable. Who could she be dying for, if not herself, if not for the American television star, with an eyebrow piercing?

The mango mochi is the only thing that will not return to the same body. It is bleeding its luscious ice cream blood out onto the road. All the other items are scattered about, waiting for their turn to be attended to. She is also one of those items. A lovely, emphatic item. A painting, even. A renaissance painting referencing the crucifixion of Jesus. I am not Jesus, she is a painting of Jesus. The near-death experience becomes an utterly enviable slice of beautiful life, a moment of ecstatic repose. There is no inside to attend to, because there is no outside. There is only open space. Rims of a body no longer the mark of difference, now just a way to feel the asphalt. It is so warm. I am in a warm bed. I am falling asleep like an anonymous user at night, and I can’t hear the headphones twenty feet away still playing the song I had been listening to when I was hit, which is called Living Waters.