When I was almost three, I cracked my head on the hearth in our family room.

This was a big deal for a few reasons, not least the amount of blood that emerges at the slightest head wound, or the fact that I was so little, I could easily have bled out. Aside from the questions of blood and possible untimely death, there were other reasons.

Firstly, this was during my sister's 11th birthday party. It meant we had an audience of more than just my sister and my parents. My sister was attempting to show off her dance moves, something we'd done before, but this time when she dipped me low, I fell over an ottoman and hit the hearth with my head.

Horror ensued among the gaggle of young girls invited to this party.

Secondly, my father was in the grips of an especially intractable mid-life crisis, which involved a crushing depression with paralyzing anxiety that no manner of pharmaceutical intervention was able to break. Except for Valium. My dad took it to relieve his anxiety, which was ample, almost tangible to us like a fog. Like the sleep he spent so much time doing, that when asked about my dad's favourite hobby for a Father's Day school present, I answered "sleeping."

Seeing his youngest bleeding on the living room rug, crying more from the faces staring back at her than any actual pain, my father knew he'd have to spring into action, so he raced upstairs and popped a Valium in order to steel himself for the Mario Andretti-like drive to the ER. Years later, he'd say that this accident was the event that shook him out of his depression and his general funk.

Thirdly. My mother had this schtick she used to do—whenever we'd complain of a stomach pain or some other issue that we devised in order to not have to go to school —she'd say to us, point blank: do you need me to take you to emergency?

The zero-to-60 of her saying that was usually enough to get us to shut up. Who the hell wants to go to the hospital, when all you're trying to do is cop a day off school? We were just trying to say in our clumsy childhood way that we weren't feeling it, and could we please be granted the respite of a day off?

But my mother's hypochondria—veiled though it was—and general worry that something could happen to us, something she could barely comprehend let alone live through, made her sort everything into life or death, with not a lot of room for nuance.

Me bleeding like someone in a slasher film put paid to that. Yes, mom, I do actually need you to take me to Emergency, right fucking now.

In a moment like that, those horrible ideas of what might happen are real, actually life or death. Your schtick can't diminish this, or make it go away.

-<•>-

I have especially clear images of this event in my mind. It might be my earliest memory.

I don't have any recollection of pain, whatsoever. But I have this vivid sense of what it was like to experience something happening to me in a very unreal sort of way: through the reflections and responses of people around me. People who could see exactly what I could not. Like the way you can't see your own face. People as a mirror, but in a way that didn't reflect at all what I was experiencing interiorly. Their horror no equal to my pain, my pain so much less than their horror.

One image: lying in my mother's arms in the front seat of the car, between her and my father, her hand stanching the bleeding coming from my head with a towel, hearing her voice say "Anis, drive faster," with a note of anxiety in it I had never heard before. Watching the sky fly past through the windshield. Feeling the tension between them of a suspended moment in time that was taking too long to pass.

But also the thing I had felt most secure about as a child: their ability to absolutely, 100% commit to anything that involved either me or my sister. When it mattered, there was no daylight between them.

At the hospital, I have this memory of someone greeting us at the doors, maybe a policeman? When you're small and you're bleeding, you jump any queue immediately.

I remember seeing a mother and her child, the child's face cut and bruised.

I remember being laid face down, with a cloth placed over my head that hung over my face—this was to push my hair out of the way of the wound so it could be examined, cleaned, and sewn up—and being asked if I needed or wanted anything, and because I couldn't see her, I said "my mom."

I don't think they administered any pain medication or local anesthesia. But I do remember sucking my thumb, which was at the time the best remedy for anxiety, pain, stress, pretty much anything and everything. I'll bet it beat the pants off my dad's Valium, but only so many childhood comforts are still accessible to us once we're grown.

Picture above is me at age four, December 1978, almost a year and a half after I cracked my head on that same hearth. Photo by Anis Mahli.