The car had been hit weeks before that night. The door behind the driver carried the dent of the collision. It stopped functioning, became impossible to open, rendering the back seat into a prison of sorts.
It was Saturday poker night. Every Saturday was poker night in those days. On our way to the weekly gambling my father stopped — I can’t remember why. The three of us sat in the back seat, trapped as the car idled. It was hot. We got impatient, took turns pushing the door trying to release it. It didn’t work.
It was dawn when we finally headed home. On nights like this our parents would carelessly pick us up off the floor and carry us down to the car, our sleep barely interrupted. Piled on each other in the back seat, no seat belt, rolling from side to side as the car sped through residential streets.
He was going really fast. I’m sure he was tired and maybe a little tipsy. He took the left turn onto Northern Blvd really hard — he must have been doing 50. I was sitting behind him. His turn jarred us all. I fell on the immovable door and both my sisters piled on top of me. The weight of three bodies and the inertia of his accelerated turn managed what we hadn’t just hours before: the door flew open and I rolled out into the middle of Northern Blvd. The car kept going, speeding away from me. I jumped up and chased after it yelling. I woke up as if from a nightmare and believed this was it — the finely executed plan of leaving me forever behind. He did eventually notice. Maybe my sisters yelled too. The car came to a jagged halt, he ran out, picked me up and threw me back into the back seat.
There was no asking if I was ok. I wasn’t. We moved on. When it was mentioned it was a thing that happened. I was never the focus of the thing.
I was seven years old, newly in America, still learning to speak English, rushing to catch up to my younger sisters. On Monday in school I tried to explain to the teacher’s aide what happened. I used an eraser and a pencil — the eraser was the car, the pencil was Northern Blvd. But I couldn’t get her to understand. I couldn’t ask for what I needed. I couldn’t decide if I was lucky that it was dawn and this main artery of Queens was desolate. If it had been a different time of day surely I would have been run over. Surely there would have been cars behind us. I knew that much. But I could not convey the scar of this much knowing.
Argy Koutsothanasis is a poet and creative director based in Queens, New York. She is the great-niece of Markos Vamvakaris, the father of Greek rebetiko music, and descends from a family of artists rooted in Syros — her great-grandfather was a poet. After two decades in fashion and sports media, she is returning to poetry and completing her first manuscript.