Crushed (Sketch #3)

SLAAAAAM. My whole body lurched forward into the expanding air bag. It seemed as if time was going at a crawl as my red Volkswagen Bug smashed into the beige sedan. Pieces of my car flew across the pavement. I started to feel pain all over, but then everything went black.

When I woke up, I was laying in the back of an ambulance with a medic by my side. “She’s awake!” I heard from what seemed like a mile away. My eyes opened as I tried to remember why I was there in the first place. As my fuzzy mind tried to remind me of the events of the car wreck, I hear my mom’s voice and see her coming up to the stretcher. “Is she okay?” she frantically asked the medic. “Yes, she will be alright. But we will have to take her to the hospital right now.” As if on cue, the ambulance’s siren started wailing as it lurched forward at a lightening rate.

Those next few days were not the most enjoyable in the hospital. First, I had to learn exactly what happened since my memory of those few seconds was very blurry. Here’s the story. My mom and I were coming home from a doctor’s appointment that I had, so she was following me in her car. I was in the far right lane, and the road was jam-packed with cars (as Dallas usually is). My lane was unusually clear, so I started to drive at a normal speed next to the unmoving cars in the other lanes. Unfortunately, a woman had just turned across all of the traffic, thinking that my lane was clear. Well, it wasn’t, so I slammed into her at nearly 50 miles per hour, which could explain the extreme damage in the accident. In fact, both cars were completely totaled. But on the slightly bright side, it wasn’t my fault at all so her insurance had to pay for a new car for me.

Besides these recollections, I had to deal with the fact that I had tubes coming out of me at every angle. I don’t do needles very well, so that was a large issue on my part. Luckily, despite the horrific accident, I only had bruises all over, whiplash, and a slightly cracked rib. But I definitely know that it could have been much worse than that. I was especially luckily that my mom could stop in time in order to avoid me, and that she could come with me to the hospital.

The hardest part about this accident, however, wasn’t the physical damage I had. It was dealing with the fact that I had to get out there and drive again. Even after getting the new car a couple of weeks later, I still couldn’t do it. As an about-to-graduate senior, I seriously had my parents drive me everywhere for about a month or so. Finally, after much prayer and encouragement from my parents (I’m sure they were sick of driving me), I got back on the roads. And I have to say, it was a weird experience.

I wouldn’t have thought it would have been so hard to learn to trust myself again. Even after almost a year, I still have to give myself a pep talk to drive during any form of traffic. But I have truly learned that it is possible to repair trust again. It may be very hard, but it is possible. I just had to get back out there and do it. I’ve had many experiences of different people losing my trust, and I’ve always had trouble giving it back to them. But if I could give myself my trust back, why couldn’t I give it to others as well? The memories may not go away, like my car crash, but I can still learn to trust. Life is definitely way too short to not pour ourselves fully into our relationships by not trusting others.

I may not be perfectly healed from this event (heck if I sneeze I can still pop my rib out!), but it in enough retrospect now that I can see the value I found somewhere in the ashes of my red Volkswagen.