An open letter to that girl I hit on my bike yesterday.

My bad.

Seriously, it probably sucked pretty hard to be you at like 8:45 a.m. yesterday, face down on the grass outside of FT with your backpack, your little bicycle-basket-thing and your pride strewn all across the bike path. And also the thirty-some-odd people laughing at you from the bus stop must have just been salt in the wound too, huh? Honestly, I didn’t mean to laugh either — especially since I was the other half of the bike accident — but did you see your face? You really should have seen it.

It was so “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” You know, that LifeCall commercial with that old lady who falls down? Her name was Mrs. Fletcher, I think? No? Nevermind then, uh, regardless, please let me extend my deepest apologies to you and try to explain myself.

As much as I’d like to, I can’t really describe what was going through my head at the time, I think it must have been something like this: “Just a small town girl, Livin’ in a looonely world, SHE TOOK THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN GOING AN-N-NYWHER–” and then I slammed the fuck into you.

I know you must have a lot more questions, but Journey isn’t the answer to all of them, so let’s take this one thing at a time. Firstly, no, I didn’t mean to slowly meander into the your lane on my brand-new $129 gearless wonder. Secondly, yes, I do realize that there was a solid 10 seconds there where I just kind of floated down your lane, zoned out, yet stared directly at you. And finally, yes, I probably could have gotten out of the way like 20 times over, but I didn’t, OK? Honestly, it did actually occur to me at the last second to just tuck ‘n’ roll and let my bike alone do the dirty work, but then I thought, “What if you really get hurt?” No, it’s not your personal safety that I was worried about at the time. Think of it this way: It’s like in elementary school when you kick a kid in the head, and he wails and screams and twitches until a yard duty comes over to hand out time-outs and all of a sudden the real victim is your poor, innocent foot. Long story short, I didn’t want to have to fake a spinal injury.

That said, I still believe I don’t deserve all of the blame here. At the time, my BAC was definitely a nice round 0.0 (assuming that morphine, oxycontin and heroin don’t have alcohol in them), I was in peak physical condition and I’ve been emotionally stable for almost three weeks now, so something else must be the culprit.

The guilty party, you ask? GOLD. That sheisty sonuvabitch closed every discussion except for a god forsaken one at 9 a.m. all the way in Broida Hall. Do you know how much it sucks waking up at 8:49 in the morning? Or how boring anthro is? Also, I’m a freshman, babe. I don’t even know where the fuck Broida is.

You may not believe me here, but let’s agree to disagree. The past is the past, right? Good. So all apologies aside, in between trying to make your basket fit onto your bent handlebars and kicking my bike chain back into place, I never really caught your name. Mine’s Dave, lots of people call me Ferry though. It’s a long story really and… well that’s unimportant now, but I skipped lunch in between classes to write this thing, so you wanna grab a bite or something? Or maybe hang out sometime, watch a movie or anything really? Call me?

David Ferry is an undeclared freshman at UCSB.

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