Understanding In A Car Crash.

If you are a friend of mine on Facebook, you saw yesterday (7/11) that I uploaded a photo of Sarah's Saturn dashboard with both airbags having been set off and in the process of deflating; the caption read: "To the driver of the red Pontiac: thank you for screwing up our evening."  Yesterday seems like such a whirlwind and I wonder if it really happened, but then I look at the bruise and swollen mark on my leg and realize that it did.  As even mere hours pass since it happened, I keep wondering whether the details are getting clearer or clearer as I saw them.

As the car crossed our lane of traffic and we were preparing to collide, I remember just sitting there watching it all unfold from the passenger seat.  There's a scene in the beginning of the movie Garden State where Zach Braff is having a dream where he is in a plane that is going down and as everyone is screaming and in a panic, he is sitting in his seat disaffected, calm, and stoic.  It kind of felt like that for me.  There was no jerk reaction, no heavy breathing, nothing.  When we hit, the only thing going on in my head as there was the squealing of tires, crunch of vehicle bodies, and the deployment of airbags was: "Wow.  The sound is deafeningly quiet now."  My ears were ringing and everything was muffled for a moment.  I remember Sarah asking me if I was okay and my only response as I went through the motor checklist of my limbs and body my only response was: "I don't know."

The emergency vehicles begin to arrive and it quickly becomes a scene from a cheesy B-film (including the helpful man with the ZZ Top beard in the pickup truck who witnessed it all happen).  I then received an epiphany to a question I had wondered my entire life: I wonder what people think about as they are standing at the scene of a car wreck witnessing the emergency response crews working.  The answer is: not much of anything.

Here's to hoping the rest of the summer gets better.