Someone Take The Wheel

I had always heard about how dangerous black ice was. Car insurance commercials, my mother, that one Carrie Underwood song — hell, there’s even a scent of air freshener named after it. The thing about all of those warnings is that they all do absolutely nothing to actually prepare you for dealing with black ice. For one, you don’t see it coming. At all. That’s kind of its thing. One moment you’re cruising down the I-69 on-ramp, the next your cruising into four lanes of oncoming traffic. Now, I’ve had my fair share of intense, introspective moments in my life, but there’s something about riding in a 3 and half ton metal death box hurtling towards a lot of other, faster, 3 and a half ton metal death boxes that really makes you take stock of your life. Things slow down, and you have a lot of time to think.

There’s that old saying that you see your entire life flash before your eyes in the moments before you die. For me, it was more like performance review; a systematic cataloging of all I had done in my short time on earth, and whether or not any of it was meaningful. Whether or not I had contributed, made an impact, not completely wasted my brief 16 years of existence. I decided, in that moment, that I had not. I had never volunteered for the homeless, never helped an old lady across the street. I wasn’t a great prodigy or the voice of my generation. I wasn’t much of anything, to be perfectly honest. But in that moment, I also realized that it simply did not matter. Maybe I hadn’t contributed to the greater good of the world, but I had existed, and to my credit I had managed to not make anything noticeably worse for the most part, which in my eyes (given the intrinsic value of human life and mankind’s propensity for fucking things up) was a resounding success. In that Inception-esque moment, one minutes stretched into twenty, a vehicle hurtling off a road, I decided that I was satisfied. I was ready to die. I closed my eyes, and I waited. I waited for the oncoming traffic to claim me, for the 3 and a half ton death machine I was riding in to be turned into 3 and a half tons of scrap, the world’s heaviest coffin for the world’s most insignificant kid. I imagined my mom and my siblings, and I imagined how heartbroken they would be. I imagined all of the kids I had never spoken to or never liked, all claiming me as their posthumous best friend. I imagined a 9 to 5 commuter just trying to get home, stuck in standstill traffic because I had the audacity to pick this day to die. I imagined all of these people, all of their thoughts, actions, and emotions, all the while knowing full well that I would not be there to experience any of them. I thought of them, and still I waited. And waited. The centrifugal motion of the car was almost relaxing, like a boat on the waves. I was suddenly and completely overcome with a serenity unlike any I had ever felt. My brain was flooded with organic opiates, dopamine and endorphins sung in harmony with the voices of what I could only imagine as angels, a siren song readying me for the end. It worked. I was ready. Ready for a blissfully easy death. One moment I would be there, the next I would not. It would be gentleness in the instantaneous. No pain, no heartache. I would simply be gone. And then, I felt it. The impact. The slamming of metal on metal, the jarring of my bones, the engine block condensing into a third of its original size. My head whipped, my neck lashed. My forehead rebounded off of the seat in front of me, only to find the embrace of the hard plastic behind me. I was wrong. It hurt like hell. But then, it stopped. Everything stopped. I have never experienced a silence so tangible, so full of uncertainty as the one that hung over the faux-leather interior of the car. I opened my eyes. I saw, in a blur, the two other occupants of the car, two of my best friends, slouched in the front seats. For a long moment, I presumed them dead. I saw them move. I presumed them alive. There was a much longer moment before anyone spoke. I heard a voice. “Is everyone alright?” I would later find out it was mine. We all nodded. We called who we needed to call. We waited. We left. We were alive.

Since then I’ve often thought of how strange it is that the world continues on without us once we’re gone. Our egos put so much importance on ourselves that we can’t help but see ourselves as somewhat of the epicenter of human interaction, and it’s hard to imagine it going on without us. A story ambling on without a protagonist, a protagonist no longer able to amble on. This obviously could not be farther from the truth, but in the days and weeks proceeding the accident I felt an uncanny confusion about this fact, that life could continue on after my death. That my mother would still grow old. That my sister, my twin, would still grow up, maybe get married, maybe have kids, kids that would have only one uncle, me not being one of them. I came to realize much after that day. Most prevalent though, was this: not that I am unimportant — nobody is unimportant — but that, like everyone else, the world can, and will, go on without me. It’s easy to take this message as a nihlistic one, one that diminishes the worth of human life. But I think it’s the exact opposite. If everyone is equally important, if the world would go on just as well without each of them, then that means just that: everyone is equally important. However beautiful and complex and full of folly and mistakes and yet wonder and joy and hope your life is, that of the person next to you is just as full of the same. I don’t think that’s nihlistic. I think it’s wonderful. That accident was the longest minute of my life, not just because of what happened then and there, but because I will remember it, relive it, and learn from it for the rest of my life — and in the end, there’s nothing we do longer than live.