It has been a little over a year since I wrote, uploaded to Substack, and promptly deleted “Driving Lessons with Criss Angel”. I decided to re-upload it because of it’s personal significance. Though I’m not sure the body ever fully forgets tough and scary things, I think it is important to note that they do get much easier to manage over time.
I’d also like to extend a huge thank you to The Dry River’s editorial team for their work on this piece. They were very kind to me at a time when I was pretty bad with deadlines. Thank you.
24 hours before I got the email that would confirm my involvement with the first issue of The Dry River, I got into a car crash. My good friend and I were on a business trip in the countryside, traversing metro Vancouver farmland while location scouting for a music video. We were stopped at a red light between two big acres of farmland, and while we were waiting, an Amazon delivery truck smashed into us from behind, crushing us into the car in front of us and then into oncoming traffic. I was in the passenger seat, we both sustained minor injuries.
I have explained the accident far too many times to count. It’s become akin to reciting a grocery list. Since it happened, I have been describing the same moment to concerned family members and friends, because it seems hard for people to understand the severity of what happened without a detailed account. I keep saying that our car got cubed. I keep including the fact that there was smoke everywhere, and the airbags went off, and if the people in the other lane didn’t swerve out of the way at just the right second like they did, we would have been T-boned. When I say the two of us were lucky to make it out with as minor injuries as we did, it’s synonymous with shaking a listener’s shoulders and saying we were equally as likely to have died. Explaining the accident in painstaking detail feels necessary on a kind of molecular level, as if tethering it to words is the only thing stopping my cells from cosmically rupturing out of existence.
I haven’t been able to write about anything else since. Maybe it’s true that it’s hard for others to wrap their heads around the severity of it all when we came out so unscathed, but it’s also been proved to me time and time again that no one really cares how severe it was because we are people that they love who are scared, and we are still here to feel that feeling. I am so glad that those I love have the opportunity to take that for granted— that they didn’t have to cope with the alternative possibility. Yet, it feels as if I’m somehow still trying to connect two worlds together at the seams. It is hard to remember that despite this big, awful, terrifying thing happening, the road that we were on is still just a road. That the people who care about me will only ever understand the essence of what happened. I can talk all day about how bad it was, but it doesn’t really matter because we are here, we are alive, and the people who love us can give us a hug and bring us cake that we can eat with our working mouths, because we are here and that’s all they care about. Perhaps there is another dimension where this is not the case. I don’t feel as if I was able to make some kind of contact with that world, but I know it’s out there now. Maybe I brushed shoulders with that version of myself while it happened. I keep joking to my friends that everyone should have a near death experience in their twenties at least once, for the sense of perspective. When we got out, I was looking at my friend while she looked at her car and chanting “We’re alright. We are okay” until I remembered that I read a therapy book that said that telling people they’re alright isn’t empathetic to their feelings, but it didn’t really matter because I was definitely saying it more to prove it to myself.
I’ve been sleeping with the light on for the past few weeks. Not because I am scared of the dark, or because I get too in my head about it all when I’m alone (I do that with company, too). It’s more that I’ve felt like I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I didn’t really cry until my friend’s dad picked us up. They asked me what I needed, and I realized I had been so focused on making sure that my friend got what she needed, collecting insurance, photos, belongings into a comically large cone shaped plastic evidence bag, trying to make the people around me laugh so that they knew the hard part was over. I had absolutely no idea what I needed. I hadn’t even considered how I felt yet. Which is probably why I’m sitting here writing this now. I’m not sure what to call it, or if it’s a symptom of my dissociative disorder, but I’ve spent the past few weeks worrying that something is going to switch, and I am going to just… die. That the semi-trucks from the other side of the road had locating devices and are going to crash into my bedroom in the middle of the night. Or maybe that this has all been some kind of prolonged hallucination my brain is using to cope with the fact that I am in fact still in it, still crashing. I do not remember the time between trying to unlock my door and ending up on the side of the road. I didn’t realize that before the crash I was wearing glasses, and after I was not. I didn’t even hear us getting hit. People always talk about how when you’re in any kind of near death experience, time seems to slow down. I know it’s more likely just that your body gains a heightened, chemical sense of awareness, but it really does feel like you’ve experienced a kind of magic trick. I had a whole conversation with myself while it happened. The transcript read something along the lines of:
“We are moving forward but we’re not driving?”
“Oh, we are in a car accident.”
“The airbags are going to go off so push yourself back to avoid them. I didn’t think they’d be pink, it’s like bubble-gum popping.”
“What did I learn in the instructional videos in middle school?”
“I can’t remember. I knew that scaring people by showing them graphic car crash videos wouldn’t work. Maybe if this kills us they’ll feel a little bad.”
“Can I move myself to avoid getting hurt? Are my arms close enough?”
“I mean, I can’t really do anything to keep myself safe, I just have to wait.”
“ If we die we die, and I can’t do anything about it.”
“We’re slowing down.”
“My friend is screaming. Seems a bit of an overreaction.”
Considering the fact that I was also sitting in a car being crushed like a tin can, I was quite calloused and laissez-faire in the moment. I saw my dissociation work in a time where it’s supposed to. I expressed to my roommate afterwards that it almost felt rehearsed—I have spent my whole life in a state of emergency-like high alert, so much so that I was capable of functioning normally when an actual emergency arrived. You don’t become a different person in a life altering situation. You become the same person, just faster. Everything around me was crunching and swirly, in a morose sense, magical; but in that moment, I didn’t feel like I had stopped being myself, or that the world had ruptured irreparably around me. I felt like an audience member at a Vegas strip show that knew all the magicians’ secrets. Maybe for a little bit, I was angry that there wasn’t anything more to it. That I didn’t catch a glimpse into some kind of grand design. I think a lot of these feelings on a whole have been me trying to wrap my head around the fact that being in a scary traumatic event is just a thing that happens to you sometimes, and the world keeps moving. I’m still angry at my landlord for not cleaning my apartment building. I’m still really excited to be selected for magazine submission, even though it happened in the same 24 hours as something like this.
I’ve spent most of my time between then and now doing work. I got a new job, entered a harrowing apartment hunt, reconnected with old friends, directed a music video, and wrote this. Not much has changed in the before and after, except maybe that my back hurts more than usual. Up until writing this, I had been feeling really guilty for not learning anything from the experience – like I should have become some changed, morally-enlightened person, not someone who was worried about going to the hospital near my ex-boyfriend's house. I still tense up when I smell car exhaust out of our open apartment window. I’m still thinking about it, and I’m still scared. It’s like I’m stuck between two worlds at the moment — one where I get mad at myself for feeling too okay, and one where I am mad at myself for not being okay enough. It’s oddly disappointing to think that I got that close to something really bad, and didn’t learn the meaning of life in the process; then again, it’s also funny to think I ever believed that learning the meaning of life all at once could happen in the first place.
When I was in high school, we read the one-act play Wit. It depicts the English professor Vivian who, after devoting her entire life to the pursuit of academia, gets diagnosed with breast cancer. There is a scene in the play, where a younger version of herself discusses the works of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet IV. Vivian’s professor explains that, despite her shallow reading of the piece, Donne does not actually mean to speak of the absolutism of death, but rather the idea that the only thing separating life, and death, is a comma. I really did think I got what the play was trying to say before, but I didn’t. It felt almost romantic to me when I first read it, beautiful and insightful. But I think I do now.
Maybe it’s my nihilist, tumblr ridden 13 year old synapses talking, but I don’t think there’s really a rhyme or reason to something like this happening to me. I really don’t think that if I exercised more, or masturbated less, it would have an effect on the outcome of the accident. Bad things happen to good people, and bad people, and wholly average people. My friends who love me don’t like me talking about this, but if something horrible did happen, the earth would continue to spin. There’s something a little bit freeing in that. I did almost die, but I still have to file for my student loans on time. I did almost die, but no one will decide that they were in love with me all along because of it. I would have still got the same email, at the same time, whether or not I was there to read it. I still get to write and make films. I still want to. I have kind, wonderful friends to help out until I can get back to feeling like myself, like I can do it on my own. I am still very scared that the same kind of magic that allowed me to come out of all this alive will barge a flailing truck through my bathroom wall, but I also know that’s normal. Things really do keep moving, and although I will feel bad for a little bit, it’s also nice to know that I don’t need to take anything grand out of the deal. That I don’t really need to pick up my body and start a new life with more vegetables and less grudges. That I am doing everything right by just being here. By writing my silly little essays and letting the people around me provide me with kindness, and love, until I feel ready to step out of my apartment and dip a toe back into the world I know—one that is equally capable of swaddling me with unimaginable kindness and unimaginable fear.