Automobile Accidents and Everything After

When the body is horribly jarred, the layers of the mind can experience a similar unsettling. A terrible car accident landed me in the hospital one rainy night after a friend's wedding. The streetlights were out due to a power outage, and my (sober) friend who was driving didn't see the other (drunk) driver plowing into the intersection.

Nothing I could do could stop it. Realizing this, my whole body relaxed, accepting the inevitable, becoming one with the hurtling vehicle. In total acceptance of my possible death, I actually felt my consciousness particle out from under me, preparing to vacate the flesh if the body could no longer contain the soul. We collided with the other car at 50mph, so hard that my glasses shot forward from my face, out of the car. A kind cop brought them to me later in the emergency room.

I remember the flashing lights, the rain starting to come down again, strangers in the car asking me questions. One disembodied voice asking, "Ma'am, do you feel any pain?" Me saying "My hand hurts, my chest hurts, my knee feels really wet, and there's a strange pain in my ears." A pause from the backseat, and then the voice saying "That would be my thumbs, ma'am."

It seems that the way they stabilize your neck if they think it might be broken, before they haul you onto a gurney and brace the possibly damaged bits, is by holding your skull aloft using one thumb stuck in each ear.

I was lucky. I was a mass of sunset colored bruises, but the only lasting damage was the open slice to my knee. (The warm wetness, remember? No, I didn't pee myself.) They gave me lots of good drugs, I spent a while recovering in the hospital and at my mother's.

The heavy jostling from the accident plus the good drugs I was on, brought all sorts of things in my head to the surface, things I hadn't considered in years. "Auto" is about first loves that aren't the storybook romances Hallmark intended. More often, first loves signify the end of childhood, the killing of innocence, the obsessive worship and self-subjugation to something or someone that we don't yet (and may never) understand. (Like blowdryer ducks trying to derive their power from a slit-throated, shrieking deer idol? Perhaps.)

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