The day I lost my smile

We were two girls,

seventeen and eighteen,

Sundays belonged to us.

Long hours leaning out of windows,

hair flung into the wind,

laughing at nothing,

and everything.

Rose drove her old car,

a certain symbol of freedom,

the kind of machine that rattled

when she touched the clutch,

but carried us

like a promise

through the city streets.

That afternoon

was ordinary until it wasn’t.

Rose turned her head,

a shop window caught her eye,

some innocent distraction,

and I,

in the split-second clarity of fear,

I saw it first.

The lorry,

still and waiting,

an immovable wall

that rushed towards us

as though it were alive.

I wanted to scream her name,

but the crash happened before I could.

The world broke open.

I tasted iron and salt,

blood filling my mouth

with its awful truth.

My tongue brushed absence,

now half of a tooth left,

a tooth that once made my smile whole.

No belts strapped us in;

the law had not yet learned

what we already knew in that instant,

how fragile a body is.

Rose’s silence was heavier

than the crumpled bonnet.

My own breath

was a storm of glass and pain.

Afterwards,

I carried shame like a second skin.

I learned to live behind my hand,

shielding my mouth,

hiding the broken proof

of that Sunday.

Even now,

decades later,

with the tooth long repaired,

I do not smile.

Something in me was struck still

against that lorry,

caught in the red echo of metal,

forever remembering

how quickly joy can turn

to silence.

It still makes me cry.