Listen to Big Feels on Spotify, bbs. <3
Big Feels on a Near Miss:
The night before I moved out of my home and away from my husband, my car was crushed to oblivion. Like an empty beer can met with the foot, or fist (or forehead) of a teenage boy at a prairie bonfire, it didn’t stand a chance.
I had left work at the library early that day, thanks to my precarious sadness and an understanding manager. My own personal metric as to whether my sadness is too precarious or not is measuring the likelihood of whether an interaction with the teenagers will result in tears or not.
I refuse to cry in front of the teenagers.
So, I left work. I picked up a new dear friend and we went to IKEA. I bought hangers, a garbage can, other things. She told me that everything was going to feel so much better so soon. I dropped her off, took the IKEA purchases to the new place, then went back to the old house.
It was 6:28 PM. I pulled up to the front door, grabbed my purse, locked my car. Walked up the steps, shut myself inside. I went to my bedroom and stripped off my high waisted 90s jeans, put on my saggy blue sweatpants. I walked back into the living room, knowing the couch was my final destination of the day. It was 6:30 PM when everything became very loud all at once. I heard squealing tires, the smacking of metal, the crash of shattering, cascading glass.
I wondered if I could pretend I didn’t hear anything at all.
Against my will, I walked over to the door and opened it. My car was not where I put it. I took one step, then another, peering around the tree in my yard. There was my car, stuck between a small black hatchback and a big, black SUV up on the neighbour’s yard two doors down. It was facing the opposite direction I had parked it in.
I slide shoes on and walk down towards the crash, feeling the crunch of glass under my soles.
I remember that 911 is a number that you call in moments like this. I dial it, then notice a man nearby also on the phone. The operator asks what my emergency is. I yell at the man, “Are you talking to 911?” He says yes. I apologize to the voice on the phone and hang up.
I then see another man talking to the driver. I can hear how she, the driver, is panicking. The man is trying his best, but he is not very comforting. I walk beside the vehicle and look up into the driver’s seat. She is alive, she is not mangled. I ask her to breathe with me, big breath in, big breath out. She tries to get out of the car. I tell her she has to wait, that everything is going to be okay. She says it isn’t, it isn’t going to be okay. I tell her she is alive and that is the most important part. I tell her no one else is hurt. Eventually someone walks up and says they have first aid, they take over. Someone asks me to go get tissues.
The man on the phone with 911 and the first man talking to the driver had been standing out on the lawn when the SUV came rattling towards them. She had been drinking. She was texting. When she hit my car, a vodka bottle flew out the passenger window like a scene from a heavy-handed, poorly written movie. If the neighbours did not have a raised lawn, it would have hit them both, father and son. The SUV would have barrelled into their house.
After getting off of the phone with 911, Son keeps walking around and introducing himself to people. He tells them how it happened, how he had stood right there, then shakes his head wryly, saying, “This is some way to meet the neighbours.”
The driver’s mother was there before the ambulance. She comes so fast, we think someone called her. No one called her. She was trying to drop off food at her daughter’s house before bingo. When her daughter didn’t answer the door, she left, came across the accident by chance. She runs by me yelling, “That’s my daughter!”
Later, while her daughter is loaded into the ambulance, I see Mother crying. I ask if I can hug her, she says yes. We hug. I tell her it doesn’t matter about the cars, that at least her daughter is okay. She says, “She’s not okay. We have her kids. I bring her food every week.” I tell her I’m sorry, hold her tighter.
The men come out one by one from their houses, cross their arms, jut out their chins. They make low sounds mimicking disapproval, trying to mask their quiet glee at being on the scene of something real; their relief at having a new first hand account to relay slowly at social gatherings.
The cops come and start taking pictures. The cop cars and the ambulance and the fire truck take up most of the street. The bus pulls up and I think it will not fit, it cannot, but it creeps by, slowly, keeping its route, staying on schedule.
Whenever someone new wanders by me, I raise my arm, a little gold lucky cat, pointing at my car, “That’s mine. That one is my car.”
At some point I grow self-conscious of my saggy sweatpants, go back inside, put on my light denim jeans. I call my sister, screaming, laughing, somehow the loud has been trapped inside me, I need to get it out, so I laugh as loud as I can. I yell, “The universe is trying to flatten me.” She says, “No, no, I don’t agree. I think the universe wants you to leave everything behind. I think it wants you to start brand new.”
I hang up when there is a knock on my door, it is one of the cops. He has twinkly eyes and his posture changes when he sees me. He makes his body as tall and broad as it can be, while also trying to keep a nonchalant swing in his limbs that says, “I am a cool boy, but a strong boy, and very casual and maybe even sometimes sexy (do you think I’m sexy??).” I know the cue and smile smile smile. Why not, I think, sometimes it helps.
Later, it does help. He gets special permission to have my car towed to the police lot so I don’t have to take care of it myself.
It’s not only Twinkly Eyes who wants to help me. Everyone else does too. At least five other neighbours tell me, “If there is anything, anything, you need, please tell me.” After the cars have been towed, another knock on the door, the man next door asks if I need a ride to work in the morning. I tell him I have the day off. When I look past him, I see Son sweeping the glass off my sidewalk, “I don’t mind!” he calls up at me, “This is some way to meet the neighbours!” I nod and smile, thank him.
The school teacher across the alley checks in on me. He fixes cars with my husband and brings us rum from Jamaica. “My daughter rides her skateboard on this sidewalk every night. She could have been here, she could have been hit.” I see him later walking back over to the accident with his daughter. They are holding hands, he is talking softly to her.
What is the mark left by a near-miss?
The next week, I wake up in my new place from a loud noise, gasping. I run to the window—has it happened again? I look out at the car my friends have lent me. It is still where I put it. A thunderstorm has started in the night, the loud has found me here, but everything is where I put it and I am still in one piece.
I keep thinking of my body, still in my car on impact, limp and flailing, a jellyfish floating, pushed away from the collision in slow motion. I often sat in my car, outside the front door of the old house for ten, twenty, forty minutes. Everything was heavy in that house at the end. It was difficult to go in. It would have been routine for me to still be there, a soft part in a hard collision.
I tell my coworker what happened the next week and she cries. We are on desk together, but there are no customers. I am surprised by her tears, her tenderness. She tells me she is so glad I am okay. It feels strange, lucky somehow, to glimpse the small impact of my life on another person.
It also feels strange (unlucky this time) to keep plodding away with everyday tasks when my life is being meticulously pulled apart, bit by bit: still walking through grocery aisles, helping someone print out immigration papers, dealing with insurance. At what point are we allowed to stop?
I call my sister from the darkest corner of my closet (the place I go when I am at the edge of the universe). I ask her when I can go to the hospital. When is it too much? When can I hand over my keys and my phone and my bank card, let someone else make decisions and put food in my mouth. She reminds me that I only burrow myself away into dark corners when I feel unsafe, “Do you feel unsafe?”
What is the mark left by a near-miss?
I go to Saskatchewan and visit my family the next weekend, tell them that I’ve left my husband, that I’ve moved out. When I turn around to go back home again, my mom hugs me and tells me to drive safe, starts to tell a story of the last person she heard of who died driving. I interrupt her, tell her not to worry, that I don’t think a car crash is my fated death. If it was, I just missed my best shot at it. We laugh because it’s silly, but maybe also true, and there is some kind of solace in that.
Talk soon,
Natahna
The recommends: Using the labels on your phone alarms to put in little reminders of silly love and care to yourself (I’ll say it once, I’ll say it a thousand times: the more hurt you get, the sillier you have to be with your healing. Get into it). ;)
"What is the mark left by a near-miss?" Oooooooooof. I love how you infuse poetry and philosophy into your life. You ARE ancient and vast, and a goddamn big deal, and all the things 😘