I wrote this in 2006, but never posted it. Found it in some old folder.

About two weeks ago I was a passenger in a T-bone collision with a very mis-handled taxi. I wasn't hurt, but my friend Jamie was, and her car was totaled.

Saturday night at about 2:30 am I was roused from my gentle slumber (gin- & weed-soaked couch-nap) by a tremendous IMPACT. Turns out a car traveling very fast had slammed through a row of parked cars out front, off of a tree, and into what's left of the outer wall of apartment #8.


I don't know the condition of the driver or his passenger, but there was a lot of shiny meat carried away on long spine boards sporting c-collars.
[I’ve since learned they both died.]

Accidents are a dime a dozen. The background noise in any daily news report. There were so many car accidents and car-related deaths on Saturday night/Sunday morning I could only find one mention online to our late-night apartment remodeling:
http://www.komotv.com/news/story.asp?ID=45142

Everything changes with an accident. Life becomes divided; ‘before’ and ‘after’. Every day after has a different flavor, and a long time is spent processing the event.

If it's an accident you're directly involved in, you end up replaying it, over & over. It's like having a bad song stuck in your head you can’t shake, except it comes with very bright pictures and the (gorgeous) sound of breaking glass.

I've been in my share of accidents before, most of which I have caused (often intentionally). So far I've skidded through unscathed, unscarred, unbroken.

But what really has caught my attention in the last couple of weeks is the very instance of the accident itself. Maybe it’s because I’ve been an observer to both accidents. They happened near me, not to me. After any accident; shock, processing, replaying, coping, moving on. Occasional pangs of ‘before’.

But the accident itself. The very instance of impact. The fulcrum of ‘before’ and ‘after’. Somehow I never noticed it. In a split-second your world is lifted up, shifted an 8th of a degree, and set down in an entirely new configuration. It looks exactly the same, if briefly brighter. But your world’s ever so subtly different now.

There’s purity in it, this silent click. A switch is thrown, lost in the thunderous conversion of so much kinetic energy. Then an instant of pure awareness. But only for a moment, and then it’s gone, and you’re left dealing with the ‘after’.

It’s very tantalizing, that moment.