“I’m okay. I’m okay.” I didn’t know how many times I said it, or when I started to realize I was saying it not because it was true, but because I knew it wasn’t and was trying so desperately to convince myself it was. I started to throw a “yeah” in front from time to time, as if the casual nature of such a word might diminish just how serious I had begun to perceive the situation to be.
They kept asking, so I kept saying it—“I’m okay.” I finally started to realize they weren’t looking for that answer; they were calling me out on the falsity of my statement, simply waiting for me to admit the truth. That’s when the first tears started. Unwelcome visitors bringing the reality of my panic uncomfortably to the surface. The tears were the inescapable proof that I was lying: I was not okay. And although they had already known it, now I could no longer pretend.
I didn’t want the tears to gush—no sprinklers masquerading as tear ducts, no wailing cries—all I could think of was how desperately I wanted to not make a scene. This was a wish completely devoid of any semblance of possibility, considering the fact that the right side of my windshield was currently being invaded by the left end of a tow truck, while my passenger door hugged it like a stubbornly terrified preschooler who couldn’t fathom why his mother would abandon him in this foreign hellhole. The intersection had already become a stage, privy to the curious eyes of passersby; a weeping young woman would only prove to be another player. When Shakespeare said “All the world’s a stage”, car crashes were not what he had in mind.
Impact. That’s what everyone talks about, right? Moment of impact. That’s the point in the movie when the slow motion kicks in, the driver or passenger rolling—almost twirling—quite gracefully through the air. The glass shards twinkle across the screen to the soft crescendo of classical music. They make it look artsy. Unless the beauty of the music and the subtly selected camera angles are meant as an ironic and clearly purposeful juxtaposition of the hideous and jarring nature of a car crash, it’s really all wrong.
The moment of impact isn’t the one that stuck with me, though. There’s a brief moment where it just seems wrong—I cannot even begin to fathom the measurement of time during which the brain registers this, or how long it takes for the thought to blossom into the realization of the root cause. There is a recognition that, according to the logic of mere seconds ago, your vehicle and therefore the body inside it should be in motion, and they simply aren’t. But these thoughts are not what stuck with me. Nobody talks about the disintegration of logic in your body’s reaction, the diminished sense of prioritization. The minutiae that you focus on.
“You’re bleeding.” I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear it—blood at the scene of a car accident is a far cry from unexpected—and yet, like everything else, it seemed wrong. It was true though. Left knee. Small cut. It was a surprising amount of blood for such a cut that size, gruesomely disproportionate. I didn’t know what I had hit my knee on, or how long it had been bleeding, and I’m sure the tow truck driver and his passenger took the expression on my face to be horror at the sight of my own blood—terror spurred on by the tangible proof of my bodily harm.
It wasn’t. I was embarrassed.
All that blood, and not a single Band-Aid in my car.
Oh, the things I would have given simply to have one tissue to wipe the blood away. It was a blatant reminder of my complete and utter helplessness: I couldn't even wipe away the blood from a cut. Perhaps, in some small sense, my mind recognized this. My focus on it was not quite compartmentalization so much as a shifting of priorities to cope with the confusion and discomfort: If I can wipe this blood away, I can take care of this. I can handle this situation. In the days that followed, I made a joke of it: of all the things to focus on—the shattered windshield, the ruined headlight, the dented passenger door, the tears, the confusion, my mother’s suffocating hugs—I had just wanted a Band-Aid. And the jokes brought laughs, because I could stand there and tell them. We could laugh, because I was fine.
The soreness came the next day, and the day after that, a familiar sensation made foreign by the nature of its origin. I grew to accept it, as I adjusted to hearing myself referring to the fact that I’d been in a car accident. As I write, it still seems wrong. It still sounds wrong, too—and as much as I loathe the sight of the word “wrong” written over and over again, I am at a loss for any superior or even equivalent wording or phrasing to accurately reflect my sentiments. Hearing it, it seems someone else’s voice should be greeting my ears with the phrase, someone else’s lips should form the words. It’ll pass, I know it will, and the cuts will close and the bruises will fade and the sun will rise and set and the seasons will change, and there will come a day where the tires of some car—possibly the black 2007 Mercury Milan which, on a fairly average Wednesday morning, hit the back of a tow truck in my home town—will roll over the pavement on that intersection, and my heart rate will barely register a jump.
But until that day comes, I’ll settle for appreciating the irony of hitting a tow truck which, of course, would not tow my car home.
