When I fell off my bike, my knee wasn’t the only casualty. As I lay in the ambulance and listened to the sirens above, my worry moved from the pain in my leg to whether I’d lost anything during the fall. I saw I was missing a shoe, but the nurse assured me that it was with my backpack on the floor. I then checked my pockets in search of my wallet, keys, and phone.

The latter seemed to have fared pretty well, despite my refusal to ever use a protective case. The glass of its front and the back was fully intact. I thought that it’d made it through unscathed, until I noticed that half of one of the camera lenses was missing. Shit.

Later, as I sat awaiting the results of my x-ray, I began to nervously pick out the last tiny shards of glass from the broken lens until the whole camera module was exposed. I then checked which of the three cameras on my phone has broken and discovered that it was the 0.5x zoom lens.

My first instinct was to look to buy a new phone. For a while I’d been secretly waiting for an excuse to retire my iPhone 12, and this seemed like the perfect one. During the next few days at home, I busied myself looking at options, from refurbished iPhones to Androids.

But then I started taking photos with the broken camera. I discovered that the photos would come back blurry, way too high in contrast, and with an odd perspective. As I hobbled around in pain and on my crutches, the photos I took were dizzy and disorientated—just as I was. It all seemed very fitting, so I never did change phones.

These are some of the photos from that time.

This title of this post, ‘Mareo’, is a Spanish word meaning dizziness or vertigo. I think it sums up my experience well.