Barriers

I was losing control of my car. The highway was slick with rain, shining like spilled oil over the nighttime road. I was angry, with the divider on one side, pinning me in, and a barrier on the other side. I was angry and I was out of control.

I had had a day. Work sucked, in the way that not only mentally drains, but emotionally cripples. I hated it. Stewing in likewise crippling PTSD, in which I lashed out at strangers, I had my foot on the gas, and I kept accelerating, like a mad man. Like a mad, angry, crippled woman.

I had encountered a blue minivan on the highway, going forty. Forty! I had to get around them. I had to get around them. I had to SHOW them they were wrong, oblivious, worthless.

I floored the gas. Here’s what is fun: that giddy feeling of getting away with something. Of being bigger than stupidity.

But here’s the thing: I lost control of my car. Suddenly, like a switch somewhere in the cosmic universe had been flipped, my wheels couldn’t hold traction. I was sliding all around the highway.

I was going ninety five miles per hour.

At this point, I had passed the blue minivan. The blue minivan was truly, in this moment, seemingly oblivious - it was going the speed limit, maybe sixty five or seventy miles per hour. In desperation, I floored the brakes. My car skidded even more. My wheel jerked all around like it was having a seizure.

The blue minivan was coming up right behind me. I closed my eyes. I closed my eyes, like it made sense to give up. I thought: I hope there aren’t children in that car.

Just then, a wide patch of grass appeared out of nowhere, on the righthand side of the highway. My car perfectly skidded onto it, coming to a complete stop right in the middle of it.

I was shaking. I was shaking like I myself was having a seizure, like the steering wheel had passed it on. My hands gripped the steering wheel like I was trying to crush it, break it into a million little pieces. A million little horrible pieces of agony.

I had never prayed, but in that moment I put my hands in the prayer position. I watched the blue minivan go by, unscathed. I would never learn if there wete children in it. I looked around for cops: none.

I was at that point supposed to be on my way to therapy. I continued to drive there, shaking. When I got there I told my therapist everything that had happened.

I asked her to take my drivers license. She didn’t.

My anger issues back then were rife. I know that. I really do. I can talk about my mom, how it’s all her fault. But who had the car, in the rain, with their own decisions completely their own?

I still think about that sometimes. The rain, the moment I put my foot on the gas: eighty, eighty five, ninety. Ninety five. How I didn’t care at all about the consequence. For anyone, but least of all myself.