Fall ’96 – Car Accident
Originally published December 27, 2015
Its dark around me, with the exceptions of a few red and white faded lights, like headlights in fog. Why am I sitting here? My hands touch the ground as I try to get up, I’m sitting on the street – I pause and try to turn around but unable to. How’d I get here? What’s the last thing I remember, what’s the last thing I remember, what’s the last thing I remember? I remember being abruptly woken up, seeing lights coming at us and possibly going unconscious. I heard a knock on the window and with glazed over eyes see someone pointing at the door yelling something, I couldn’t tell what he was saying and I pass out again.
Glass shatters, the door opens and I’m being pulled out of the car, half aware. But I hear him saying “we need to get you out of the car now, I got you, get out of the car”, I tell him I need my glasses and reach in to grab them. He pulls me out on the street and makes me sit to the side, glasses in hand but nobody in sight. He’s gone. And nobody is around me, not the driver nor the other passengers.
Can’t hear anything though but I see shadows moving around and smoke in a few feet in front of me. I shift my body around because I can’t turn my head, I see a car upside down in a ditch behind me, the wheels still spinning. I see the car I was in, in front of me, the driver’s side window shattered and the back door wide open. Where’d this guy go, who is this guy and where’s everyone else? I get up slowly. I’m not hurt, but I can’t turn my head that much I know. So far, I’m in tact and don’t see any blood anywhere on me. I walk into the smoke and see the car I was in, the front of the car pushed all the way to the drivers seat.
A man runs towards me and asks if I’m ok. To the paramedic I say I am. He tells me to sit and asks how I got out of the vehicle? I told him about a man smashing the front window to open the door and pull me out. He asks me if I know what he looked like, because apparently the cops didn’t pull me out and neither did him or his partner that night. And being in the middle of farm land, there are no homes insight, nothing around us but this one lane street and corn fields for miles. He told me there was gas filling the car, but the other suffered more injuries so they had to pull each one of us out one by one and I was next (and last).
I didn’t walk out of the car on my own, I was pulled out. The person that pulled me out had to have known there was some sort of gas that was engulfing the car and that I wouldn’t survive if I stayed in the vehicle. But who is he, where’d he go? All I remember is it looked like he was wearing a hat, but everything else was a constant shade of black. One by one, as I’m sitting on the side of the road, I have visitors, another paramedic, the police all of the claiming none of them pulled me out of the car. I see the driver and the front passenger walking around, minor scratches and cuts from broken glass. A gust of wind hits me as a helicopter airlifts another passenger severely injured to a hospital 60 miles away. Paramedics put me on stretcher and into the ambulance headed to the hospital. I’m fine, a bit dazed, but that’s it. I joke around with the paramedics who are confused by this behavior and one asks why I’m joking around, I tell him; not a big deal, it’s not like I’ve been in an accident or anything. He didn’t like that one.
My mind still trying to playback broken scenes from what the last 10 minutes, last hour, I don’t know what time it was nor how much time had passed until I got to the hospital. I was relatively in a good mood, seeing as we just got into a head on collision with an SUV and I survived with minor injuries. I just can’t get the thought of the mystery person who pulled me out of the vehicle.
Fast Foward 3 weeks > > > I’m back at school and walk into my dorm. Where I’m greeted from the lobby to my room by ‘oh my god, you’re alive’, ‘you can walk’, ‘holy shit, you’re in 1 piece’ and so on. Apparently, being in an accident was a boring enough story that my roommate had to embellish and tell everyone anything from, I had an arm or leg cut off to I died. Great.
The reason I’m typing this down is even though this is something I can never forget, it reminds me that I do have a second life. I almost never made it out of the first one alive but I did and I have to appreciate and enjoy it.
