Today, one car collides with another, and a man grips the steering wheel, fighting to hold himself inside the metal frame. His body sags and bobs through the hole where his car door should have been. He spins with his vehicle, which has become a kind of axis, and the forces of gravity and motion propel him toward the crossroads. His car circles through the intersection, centripetal, seeking the center of its own spin. When it stops, pushed up hard against the curb on the other side of the road, the man pulls his lagging body back into the driver’s seat.

            
           Like an apparition the man gets out and walks toward an old woman who now stands in the middle of the road, her car paused in the street. She turns toward us, the growing crowd caught with her like actors on a stage. She says to us all, “It’s my fault. I didn’t slow down.” The man checks his arms, pats down his body, shakes his head.

            
           Several thoughts circulate through my mind. I’m alive. It’s not a declaration but a question, a softening of fact. Moments before I had heard my husband, Dane, catch his breath, mumble and turn his head. At the same time—or at least nearly so—I glimpsed a blurred headlight and realized that we were about to be hit by a white car. It replays in present tense: Dane steps on the gas, a blink of metal and sky, a clash of glass, and a man hangs onto his car.

            
           I finger the scar on my cheek from when I crashed headfirst through the windshield of a boyfriend’s truck over ten years ago. Sitting unbuckled in the front seat, we had raced around the curves of the canyon road. I watched his arms flex on the wheel, then his whole weight standing on the brakes, a shrill squeal of tires treading the ground. Later, I awoke in darkness, his face close to mine, and I felt words around me, words and lights and a ringing of time in my head.

            
           I’ve survived. I look at Dane and notice the super-saturated sky behind him. His pale face fades, as if he were slowly disappearing into the background of what has just happened, those thoughts of what might have been:  What if he’d been killed?  What if we’d never left the house today, sitting instead on the porch together to watch our marmalade cat play in the grass?  What if we’d never moved to Kansas?  What if I’d never lived in that condo six years ago, never wandered into Dane’s room every night, never asked him to play that song on the guitar one more time? 

            
           I open the car door and run into the street toward the man and old woman. Their bodies are intact; I wonder if I can trust my eyes. They’re talking, the man flicking his arm at his side, flicking it as though it were asleep. Traffic has stopped, each car slowing to take in the glint of glass on asphalt. I know what they’re thinking, these people who witness an accident on a Wednesday afternoon:  I wonder if anyone’s hurt. Quickly, to themselves they say, “Thank God it’s not me.”

            
           I’m crying. When I return to the car, Dane asks, “Are you okay?”  He puts the car into drive, and we coast down the hill, keenly aware of each bump in the road, each oncoming vehicle—the presence of our bodies situated in space and time. We’re in this dimension, the living. “No,” I tell him, and I look straight ahead. The tears come and my breathing is shallow, quiet. The world has been split open like a body in an autopsy. I can see the skin of sky peeled back. Where the trees lace the blue air, I now see veins, corpses of the living. We’re exposed to the sun. We’re lying on a cold, steel sheet of earth, waiting for the final pronouncement: we all die.

            
            I want to change. When we finally turn into the relative safety of our driveway, we sit together for a few minutes with the windows open. Cirrus clouds lapse across the sky. It’s a lovely afternoon, one of the first spring days this year. Since school began last fall, we’ve been too busy prepping classes and grading papers to spend time alone. Looking at the stubble on Dane’s face, how the hairs on the back of his neck need to be trimmed, I want to stop time, to reconfigure my life. Everything seems secondary to my desire to walk into the house with him and shut the door on the rest of the world.

            
            Yet—and there always will be this subtle shift from never again to the perpetual exception—I’ll stand in front of my students later in the week and compare this experience against Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal recurrence:

                 
This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself.

           
           Dane and I will relive this near miss eternally, contemplating again the sun like a great knife cutting through an afternoon, and below it the movements of two cars colliding, the mass of one bumper accelerating the speed of another, the two objects spinning their own world, small cells in the flesh of day. I recall centrifugal forces, a circle, the curve of Dane’s neck under my hand. A body in motion tends to stay in motion.

            
            Time fills the day with more papers to grade, more meetings, more trivial concerns—more of what I would eliminate from the vision of my eternal recurrence. I go to school each day and face my students, and I come home anesthetized to the science of my own desire. Dane and I hold each other. We curl together in bed, his back to me, my arms encircling his waist, and I feel his breathing, regular and low: the bodies of two people on a slab of darkness.

            
            At night I dream of the world as a woman, her skin soft and pale. There, where her breasts loll across the continent of her chest, where her ribs ripple the surface like water—there, just above her heart—is a scar, a raised circumference of skin.