Some of this story is fiction, but it doesn’t matter which parts because that’s not the point.

When you are seventeen, riding a borrowed bicycle, you are stuck by a car and suffer what they used to call a compound fracture. You could search online for what they call that kind of break today.

But you don’t want to start your story there. There has to be more. We always want to drag out the abuse or loss or hurt. We forget how long it goes on after. So you back your story up.

It might start with why you were riding that bike that day, but instead you think back to the three-speed bike you actually owned at the time, and that leads back to the first bike you owned, and then to the first bike you learned to ride.

That first two-wheeler without brakes. It is small and does not belong to you. You do not remember the name of the little boy it belongs to. Maybe the bicycle is red. Every kid on the street is taking turns riding the bike. You are not yet six but you ride that bicycle down the hill to the end of the culdesac, down the hill to the brush and edge of the pavement. You stop yourself before you hit the metal barricade by dragging your feet on the pavement. You probably ruin your shoes. You don’t remember that. You remember being afraid you will not be able to stop, but you do stop in time, and you are more careful when your turn comes around again. You pedal up hill. It is easier to stop going up hill. What happens is that you learn to ride a two-wheeled bike without brakes. Before that there was a tricycle that you rode. Maybe it was red and white. You begin asking for your own bicycle.

Your family moves further out of the city. You are still asking for your own bike. You want a brand new red one with multiple speeds. You want hand brakes and skinny tires and a bell on the handle bar like the kids up the street ride to school. You get a used bike with fat tires and coaster brakes. It is blue. There is a little rust on the fenders. You are not allowed to ride it to school, but after school and on weekends and holidays you ride it everywhere. Miles. One day riding down the big hill leading to Echo Lake, you go so fast the brakes will not stop you in time and you fly clear across the busy road at the base of the hill before you slip off the seat and fall hard onto the frame. You miss getting hit by a car, but your crotch is on fire. You sit on the gravel shoulder of the road and cry, and then you walk the bike home without telling anyone what happened. It won’t be the only time.

Your next bike will be better. You are promised skinny tires and more than one speed. You and your younger brother are given matching three-speed bicycles with front and rear handbrakes. They are used, black bikes, “family” bikes that everyone in the family can ride: you and your brother, your mother and your dad. You do not want to have to share, but your mother never rides the girls bike. Mostly your dad never rides either. You learn the hard way why it is dangerous to use the front handbrake without also using the rear handbrake at the same time. You miss the coaster brakes. You ride this until your girlfriends at school make clear that riding a bike is not cool in seventh grade.

Then in high school, a boy you like borrows a pair of ten-speed bicycles and you are riding behind him on the shoulder of a suburban street miles from home when you are hit from behind by a station wagon. If you did some research, you could explain more about the driver and that car. Age, color, make, and model. You could draw out the description of the accident, describe the broken bone, the particular twist and impact, the rupture of muscle and skin. Someone screams, several people do. Only one of them is you. Someone calls the hospital from a neighbor’s phone. You are shaking and your face is wet from crying by then. It is worse than the other accidents you have had on bicycles. An ambulance comes, and someone gives you a shot. Mostly you don’t remember what happens over the next hours. In fact you barely remember the next week. You could ask. Maybe there are people who could fill in the details for your story. You are in the hospital for days longer than they thought you would be. You remember your mother saying this. She always said, “She should have been home sooner.” If your mother were alive, you could ask her what she meant.

And then you are in a cast and then a boot and then doing exercises to build up strength in the leg again.

That is the story of breaking your leg.

Except that’s not the story at all. That is barely the beginning of the story, even if you added in all the details you don’t remember or never knew about that instant, that week. Because the event is what we tell about, the terrible happening, how you broke your leg. But what comes after is always the longer part of the story, the more important part, and we almost never tell.

Everyone breaks things. It’s recovery that takes time. Getting the cast wet in a mud puddle, the stink from inside the cast, the pins taken out, crutches, the pain that goes on for a year, the pain that still comes sometimes and not just when weather is damp, the way your legs do not match for the rest of high school. How you still look in the mirror to see if they are different. (And they are.) The way that boy who borrowed the bikes never really talked to you ever again. How often you notice and remember and cringe inside. And even years later, a woman on her honeymoon is hit on the highway two blocks from your house. The woman is literally a brain surgeon, and she dies of traumatic brain injury three days later. You never get back on a bike ever again. You begin running instead.

You broke your leg, an event that took a second—less—and changed everything. How you got there is the easy part. Even now with the best of intentions, you barely begin the story of how you got back. Because not everyone does.