The trunk of my car opened with a thunk as the lock turned. I lifted in two large bags and one small one. The first was a one square one filled with two weeks worth of clean clothes, the second contained my backpack with my computer, textbooks, and binder, and the last held my camera and both my lenses. I shut the trunk hard to make sure the lock caught and walked back to the house.
“I’m ready to go,” I announced as I opened the door.
Maverick was the first to appear. “Bye Eli!” he said and threw his arms around my waist.
“See ya, Mav,” I said, ruffling his shaggy blond hair with one hand. He likes it long around his ears for some reason. “You can’t play Lord of the Rings without me. I want to help you beat the bonus level.”
“Aw,” he said, disappointed. “Can I play on my own file?”
“Sure,” I said letting him go, “Just don’t play on mine.”
“Okay,” he said. “Bye!” He ran off down the hall.
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“Are you ready to leave?” Mom asked. Dad followed right behind her.
“I guess,” I said, my heart heavy. I didn’t want to go back to school. Christmas break had been fantastic. “Can you help me carry my bags?”
We picked them all up, a big square one, a backpack, a duffel bag, and my camera bag.
“Bye guys!” I said to my siblings. All three of them were watching TV on the couch.
“Bye Eli!” Blithe said cheerily.
“Bye Eli!” Maverick yelled, echoing her.
“Bye!” Cadence said with a grin and laugh in her voice. “I hope I never see you again!”
I chuckled and waved goodbye. Mom and Dad helped me put my bags in the backseat of my pickup and we shut the door.
“Bye Dad,” I said, giving him a one armed hug.
“Bye. Keep us posted. Send us your schedule,” he said.
“Alright. I will.” I turned to Mom and hugged her. She’s a lot smaller than me.
“Bye, bye,” she said. “Be safe.”
“I will,” I said.
“I love ya,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “I love you too.”
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My car hummed underneath me. There was a darkening sky before me and a chilly breeze was keeping anything from warming up.
Brandon Heath played on the radio.
Touched down on the cold black tar,
Hold on for the sudden stop
Breathe in the familiar shock
Of confusion and chaos
Tears stung my eyes and I fought them off.
I passed by empty fields, the sun fading behind me, its golden rays seeming to set on fire each grassy pasture as each yellow stalks were flushed bright orange. The clock on the dash said 6:15.
Brandon had reached the chorus.
All those people goin’ somewhere
Why have I never cared?
Give me your eyes for just one second,
Give me your eyes so I can see
I murmured the words under my breath, even though I was the only one in the car. I found that I couldn’t hold the tear anymore and a single wet streak was left on my cheek as it trickled down.
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The clock on the dash said 6:15. The sun goes down sooner in January and had already gone from orange to purple and was now taking on the deepening blues of night.
“Alright,” I said into the phone. “Well, I was just checking. She sent me a text about it and I wasn’t sure.”
“Yeah, I already called,” Dad said. “Nothin’ to worry about.”
We don’t get service at my house so I had received a text message from my aunt when I got back in range. The message didn’t really pertain to me, so I called Dad after I left the house to ask him about it.
“Alright then,” I said. “I guess I’ll talk to you later.”
“Ok,” he said. “Bye.”
I turned to put my phone in the cup holder.
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I applied the brake until the car stopped. Cutting the engine, I stepped out and thrust my bare hands into my pockets to ward off the chill. The sun was gone, though purple and gold still streaked the thin clouds. I breathed a sigh.
The landscape was practically featureless. I was standing on a long, empty, and straight stretch of black highway. The ditch was steep here, making a sharp V at the bottom on both sides. A culvert went under the road and jutted out on both sides, marked by reflectors on metal poles. Half a mile down the road there was a tan house with a few bare trees standing nearby.
On the right of the road was a plowed field. It was as empty and featureless as the road, having only a row of telephone poles stuck in the ground that were strung together by a power line high above my head.
I took a shaky breath, having eyes only for the deep furrows that marked the ditch.
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I can’t describe to you how quiet it was. The wind didn’t whistle. Nothing creaked or snapped. I hadn’t screamed or cried out and, in not doing so, I felt as though my heart had stopped pumping, as if my lungs were no longer working, as if the rational part of my brain had shut down and I was doing everything automatically.
I fumbled around for my buckle, found it, and pressed the button. I fell about six inches from my seat to the caved roof of the pickup.
The light of the fading sun was dimming. I couldn’t make out what direction I was facing, but I could see the steering wheel slightly above my head and, next to that, the now shattered driver’s door window, and, though that, I could see the sky. Somehow I had landed on my side.
At first I tried to escape through the windshield, which was also busted, but instead I climbed up the seat, putting both my hands through the window and gripping the edge so that I could pull the rest of my body up.
There was a little bit of a jump from the driver’s window to the ground and, when I made it down, the adrenaline kicked it and my heart started pounding. I put my hands behind my head in shock and loosed a curse word. And then another.
I walked a few steps in one direction, turned around, and walked back, my hands still on my head. I was breathing heavily.
I turned back around because I didn’t want to keep looking at the grotesquely twisted vehicle. I suddenly had an impulse and dropped to one knee and said, gasping for breath between words, “God, thank you for keeping me safe. Thank you, thank you, thank you. . .”
I stood back up and paced some more.
“Oh my gosh,” I kept saying. “Oh my gosh.”
I came across my strewn bags as I paced. They had fallen out of my smashed windows, though they had not flown, so almost all of my things were still together
My camera bag was a little ways off, though everything inside was intact. A couple articles of clothing had fallen out of my other bag. A pair of pajama pants and a T-shirt, both a bit dusty. Some of my clothes had broken glass on them. I brushed what I could off.
It was freezing cold outside. I had put on my heavy corduroy coat before I left the house and hadn’t taken it off. Good thing I did too, because as I felt around in the dark, I realized I’d lost my phone which left me with few choices.
I looked down the empty highway in either direction. Half a mile away, a pinprick of yellow light glowed from a window pane, accompanied by a green vapor light attached to a wooden pole high above the ground. I made one last half-hearted search for my phone and gave up.
Then I crawled over the barbed wire fence and started walking.
The stars were out that night. They twinkled brightly in the now almost nonexistent light.
I remember jogging in the cold down the black asphalt and thinking, The stars are gorgeous tonight. I also remember chuckling deliriously at how incredible it was that I was alive to see stars.
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I climbed back into my car and slammed the door shut, sick of looking at the ditch, sick of trying to imagine what I could have done differently. I think about it too much. I had been, after all, completely unharmed. The EMTs that had shown up said that I was doing way better than I should have been doing. No broken bones. No head injuries. Not even any cuts from broken glass. They EMTs claimed that I would be sore the next morning and really sore for a couple days after that as well.
It didn’t happen. I woke up the next morning exhausted and feeling a little bit shaken, but not sore and I wasn’t sore the next day or the next.
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“Are you the driver?”the cop asked. They had shown up fairly quickly. I had called Mom from the house down the road and she had called the cops to make the report. We were sitting in her car, trying to keep warm, parked on the highway were I had gone off.
The cop had just finished shining his searchlight on my pickup from the highway and he and his partner made their own investigations.
“Yeah, I am,” I answered.
He gave me a disbelieving look. “Really?”It was rhetorical. I couldn’t believe what the pickup looked like either.
There was some questioning afterwards, probably to make sure I wasn’t drunk or texting, to which my answer was, of course, “No.”
He filled out some paperwork in his car and made all the appropriate phone calls. He then came to sit in the car with me and Mom, talking to us about what was going to happen. I don’t remember most of it by now.
What I do remember is this, almost word for word.
A first responder had given me a look over to make sure I was uninjured and had reported her findings to the cop.
“I need to call in an ambulance. I can’t not call in an ambulance for this” he said. “The mechanism of the crash suggests that you should be seriously injured or dead.”
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I still sometimes dream about it. Not necessarily a crashing my pickup, but of rolling. The first night was the worst. I had dreams about the screeching of my tires as I overcorrected and dreams about spinning in circles over and over and over. I had one dream that night where the world ceaselessly spun around and around, and I did nothing but stare impassively in my rearview mirror and saw nothing but my dreadfully blue eyes.
I started the engine of my new car, feeling unworthy. So much went right. . .
Part of me feels like I don’t deserve the blessings that I got after the wreck. I wasn’t hurt, I wasn’t fined, I was close to home, I missed a telephone pole by about ten yards, none of my stuff was ruined, I found a newer, nicer car for the same price as the my pickup within a few weeks of the crash. . .Honestly, I could go on.
Obviously, God has me on this earth for a reason. There are times when I don’t always feel as if that is true. Sometimes I feel hopeless. Sometimes I feel useless. But God kept me going. That is what matters.
As I pass other random cars on the highway these days I can’t help but silently think to myself, “I pray that you don’t get in a wreck today. I pray that you stay safe.”
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It took me a long time to get up the nerves to write this. I still didn't do it justice. Car crashes change you. I know everybody says so, but it's more true than you can know.
I'm halfway considering rewriting parts of this. Anyways, thanks for reading!
Picture is my pickup the morning after the crash. Took it on my way to school the next day.
-flyon