The Po Show

Crash

It's been over a week since I had my car accident. More than a fender bender, less than a major collision. No one was injured (though my neck and back hurt, more now than immediately after the accident, which is both common and annoying), which of course is the main thing. The kids were not in the car with me, so no trauma there.

It's just sobering to think that a clueless woman could shake up my existence with a simple turn of her steering wheel. She pulled a freaking U-turn right in front of me, and my car went smash (to the tune of $6400). I had that fluid, drawn-out, "oh shit" moment between the time when I realized I wasn't going to be able to stop in time, that I was going to hit her, and actual impact. My head snapped forward and back, my sunglasses flew off my face and landed on the floor of the car. My first reaction was to yell at her, as she continued to curve around my car, through the closed window, "What were you doing? WHAT WERE YOU DOING??" Then I burst into tears, hysterical sobbing that lasted awhile. She got out of her car and asked if I was all right, her mother got out of the car and asked if I was all right, and I continued to sob. "Ma'am, why are you crying?," she asked, and I wanted to scream at her that I was crying because she'd pulled a left U-turn from the right lane right in front of me and made me hit her. We'd just had a accident! Why shouldn't I be crying? Her stupidity could have fucking killed me, if the impact had been different.

For years I've said: we're all inches from death. We coast around in these metal boxes, at speeds faster than any living thing was ever designed to go. We have our air bags and our crumple zones and we think we're safe, but obviously we are not. We hear about fatal crashes all the time. We see the ambulances on the freeway, we see the headlines in the newspaper. It's the stuff of movies, but it really does happen. This woman had her 90 year old grandfather and her 85 year old grandmother in the back seat, and she pulled a stupid stunt like that. She was not *watching*, she was not *paying attention*, which seems the normal state for so many people out there. It seems like every week, I have someone pull into my lane, float over the divider line, pull in front of me in an intersection without looking to see if it's safe to do so.

We are at the mercy of the unfathomable, unknowable lameness of others. We can do all we can in our metal boxes, but there are others in their own metal boxes that can put themselves into our paths. Physics don't play, and our squishy, soft shells are no match for the crash.