Things Fall Apart
It's odd really, but I don't actually remember the accident itself. All I remember is starting to change lanes, hearing a loud bang, thinking "S*&!, I just hit someone!", and then sitting on the side of the road, suddenly motionless. The force of the impact and subsequent spin tore my glasses off my face, leaving me totally unable to regain my bearings. But Volkswagens are built well, and though the car is a total write off (I've not heard that officially, but am certain of the fact), I walked away from the scene sore, bruised, but otherwise totally unhurt. But the psychological trauma is a bit odd, a week after the crash and I'm still pretty rattled. I have to do things slowly and deliberately, noises spook me (not just loud ones), and my hands still shake a bit. I know I can drive- I have done so several times since the accident, but it will be a while yet before I can subconsciously process the firsthand lesion about how easily and quickly everything can come apart.
I'm not going to mince words, nor will I exaggerate the facts, but simply state the truth of the matter. I lost control of my car, crossed two lanes of freeway traffic, and clipped a concrete barrier at around eighty miles an hour. Someone, myself included, could very easily have been killed. And yet I walked away. I don’t feel lucky.
The realization that I walked away unhurt is more a feeling of having been blessed with a second chance and a message. This is not my time, if it were I wouldn’t be writing this. But the lesion is clear, written on forty foot high letters in my mind- GROW UP KID. Last week I was 26, and as is typical for that age I subconsciously thought that, while bad things could happen to me, somehow they wouldn’t. Except that something bad did happen, and that by the grace of God it was merely life changing, not life shattering. I’m still 26, but somehow I now feel older than that, a bit more worn. Lucky Me.
Jericho Road
On the Jericho Road there's room for just two
No more but no less, just for Jesus and you
- On the Jericho Road, Trad.
So things have fallen apart a bit. The car crash could easily wind up costing me almost ten thousand dollars when all is said and done. But that is money I have, and I’m nowhere near financial ruin. But things have been falling apart for a while now. I’ve been miserable, and misery’s best friend is loneliness. I’ve withdrawn into myself and into depression, and consequently begun to vent that frustration. I’m angry all the time, I make stupid thoughtless mistakes. On most days Sharon is the only reason to get up in the morning. I’ve seen this coming, but the crash was an inciting incident. Sharon and I have been looking to our collective future, and those looks take us West, backwards towards a new start.
Sharon is from Boston, and I am from Southern California. We met at college out west and, after I graduated, I decided that I wanted her more than home. So I followed her home and eventually proved to myself that I could indeed support myself. We got married a little over a year ago. But the Northeast doesn’t really suit me- I’ve always felt cramped back here. Sharon has a serious desire to write movies, and it is a little hard to do that when you need to fly across the country for every single meeting. So every time we talk about the future, we talk about California.
The crash has brought into focus the one reality that has escaped me, even as I have considered this for a while- the future is now. It is time to get up and shake the dust from our feet, and in a very real sense leave this life behind. There is not much to take. The constants in my life are my faith in God and my wife’s faith in me, and there really isn’t room for much more than that. The future won’t be a blank slate, but it is the beginning of something new, and I like beginnings.
