Phone devastation.

That same day a few months ago when I was going to meet my one (Romanian) colleague, I was riding my timeshare bike thing that they have in cities now, and something fell out of my backpack and clattered under the wheel, and before I knew what had happened, I ran right over my smartphone.

I turned around and got it, and it turns out that the bikewheel didn't go smoothly over it, but rather kind of picked it up and dragged it for a little bit against the asphalt, and so the bright metallic red case that I've been so proud of and liked so much for so many month already, got all scratched in broad swathes of even stripes of different widths, in like this splayed-out arc covering around like a third of the phone case.

And, it was like dirt got rubbed into those scratches, too.

With time and with the rubbing alcohol applications that I do after every time I go to work to sterilize my phone when I get home, though, the dirt is gone now, and now too the scratches almost look like some kind of abstract art, only pieces of the metallic covering are falling away in flecks, from the rim that angles up around the edge of the screen of the smartphone.