Monte

So there I was minding my own business, driving along the highway on my way to work in a morning rain shower. It was around 7:30, and I was making good time. If traffic remained favorable, I might have even arrived at work a few minutes early with just enough time to make a CVS stop and pick up a snack.

Before I left the house, I remember thinking, “What today was the day?” I think about that a lot. Never really a conscious thought but a casual “what if.” I should have known that thinking such thoughts would jinx me. Awful things happen all the time to random people, even those who think themselves invincible. And when those bad things finally do happen, which they inevitably will, you experience the shock of realizing, “Shit. This kind of stuff really does happen to people like me.”

I had one of those shocking realizations yesterday morning on my way to work. The lights up ahead all turned red at once signaling that an accident may have occurred up ahead. Either that or someone just spilled their coffee all over their lap causing a chain reaction of sudden braking. I was in the far left lane, and as I came to a complete stop, I caught glimpse of a car behind me—headed for me. And that’s when I had the previously mentioned epiphany: “Shit. This kind of stuff really does happen to people like me.”

I turned the steering wheel to the left in an attempt to move to the shoulder, but I didn’t react fast enough: The car slammed into me with a very dense crunch sound, not like the typical sound you hear on television with the smashing of glass and tearing of rubber against pavement. My car jolted off the highway and spun into a 180. When the car stopped spinning, the passenger-side rear tire was just barely resting on the pavement of the opposite lane of traffic—one more foot and I would have been hit again, and that would not have been pretty.

After the car stopped moving and the CD I was listening to stopped skipping, I inched forward slightly so as to get my car away from the other lane of traffic. I then looked over to my left to see the car which had hit me sitting still in the middle of the highway with the front driver side smashed in. Green chunks of Altima lay scattered on the pavement. I looked back into my rear view mirror to see the trunk lid flung open. “My computer!” I thought. That was my first concern, as sad as that may sound. Luckily, my PowerBook was safe and so was James’ Valentine’s present.

What a morning.

There’s nothing like a little slap upside the head to kick you back into reality. I guess it’s healthy—so long as it doesn’t kill you.