Abroad literally changed me. Forever.

When I was accepted to study abroad in Amsterdam, I was thrilled. It was something I had always looked forward to. And it lived up to my expectations – for the most part. I gallivanted through beautiful museums. I enjoyed cannabis-induced fun at the cafes. I biked around the city as a true Dutch would. I even took advantage of the fact that sex work is legal. And I made some lovely memories – but then, things went horribly, horribly wrong.

The entire ordeal started on a temperate Friday evening; I had just finished a lovely dinner in the Reguliersdwarsstraat neighborhood, and perhaps ingested a bit too much wine, for my companions and I were celebrating the glorious occasion of our being in Amsterdam by getting, as some may say, insanely fucked up. As we exited the restaurant and stumbled upon a bicycle-sharing lot, we decided it would be enjoyable to take a drunken bicycle ride along the river to the discotheque. Oh, how foolish we were.

How could I have known that my frivolous platform sandal would end up hopelessly entangled with the bicycle pedal? How could I have foreseen that my poor toe would become collateral damage in the fatal duel between my silly shoe and the cold, unfeeling bicycle pedal?

In my drunken stupor I ignored the injury. The pain in my toe felt like the pain of an entirely different person – for I was not myself in that drunken stupor. Perhaps I was still happy then, for I cease to remember the events of that night after the incident. However, my ignorance, my disregard of the injury, only awoke a vengeance within it. Oh, how I have suffered at the hands of that very vengeance. For now, my toe is absolutely wretched.

Its hideous, purple yet yellow countenance casts a chill down my spine. The toenail only grows so long before it flakes off in its entirety – a metaphor for my grasp onto the memory of an experience that will never be whole, for it was taken from me prematurely.

Every time I look at my horribly disfigured toe, I am taunted by a recounting of the events of that night. I will never wear sandals again. My pitiful little piggies shall never feel the warm caress of sunlight, all because of the wretched appearance of my gremlin toe.

The ordeal has altered my sense of reality; I question everything I once wholeheartedly believed to be true. Now, only two things make sense to me: I went abroad, and everything in my life has changed.