I shall never forget, while riding home in the morn's pre-dawn hour from a night's tom-catting in other parts of our fair west-coast city many decades ago, coming upon the aftermath of a motorbike/car accident scene with the police tape and traffic cones still in place, a small dual-purpose motorbike lying on its side some meters away from an intersection and the large pool of hydro-carbon fluids that had leaked out of its tank moist on the pavement, like blood ... two pairs of tennis shoes strewn on the pavement in its vicinity.
Shoes often get ripped from a victim's feet, during a traumatic/violent impact. Those empty shoes and that gasoline stain on the pavement left a mark forever etched in my memory.
Life is a crap-shoot; and often fleeting ...
And it was only a block away from that very intersection (the intersection, on one of Vancouver's main arterial roads, is at the bottom of a long and fairly steep hill) where a decade before that I was 'doored' by a driver while I was ripping along the flats on my bicycle just below the hill, to try and maintain my momentum (ya ya - I was splitting the space between the slow lane of traffic and the lane of parked cars). In the blink of an eye I went from screaming along at 45 mph to putting a knee through a Camero door window followed by flipping through the air like a rag doll, to tumble into the midst of a pack of mad city drivers with tires screeching just inches from my head (no helmets, back then) ...
Of course, that female driver had the audacity to start berating me vociferously and hitting me with an umbrella for having "damaged her car door in such a calloused way", while I was writhing in agony on the road ... until a concerned passer-by stepped in to put her into her place.
You just never know ... :facepalm: