Moving Vehicle
I could tell to you what it’s like, the bungee pull and snap, flinging you through the windshield and across the pavement, loss of gravity and the opposite of control, but it wouldn’t help; you’d have to experience it to know.
I could talk about pain hiding in old bones, point at those little-kid-drawing faces at the doctor that gets sadder the closer you get to ten, and you wouldn’t believe me.
My parents paved the road we wrecked with broken glass of vodka bottles, both less than good at stacking the deck, Mom always drinking more on our family trips, Dad shooting fish dead in the water.
What mom and dad got from that type of thinking was the family station wagon careening towards oblivion in the desert where families like mine went to die.
It played out like a hopeless future, a drunk mom at the wheel, bald tires on the red station wagon couldn’t hack it.
No more life for a while yet, little boy. Now is the time for you to lie in the bed of your trauma.
Time is like this: young bones mend, becoming old bones that age faster than you do, what was still is, and just because you never dealt with it doesn’t mean it won’t still be waiting. What would matter to you most, if it all got taken away?
After the car accident, I wanted to go to the beach with my friends, but getting my cast wet would be a death sentence, the doctor said. Ten-year-olds die just as easily as grandmothers, wives, or fathers. I just wanted to be able to play like I used to.
When the cast finally came off, my leg looked like bones wrapped in skin; I would have sworn it wasn’t mine.
After the crash, my mom drank full bottles of Popov vodka for more glass to cut out hearts with, and sometimes she took my baby sister on walks in front of cars at night. Eventually, mom was dead, and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it.
I don’t know where things go from here; if I could find one sliver of something that keeps me hoping, even if just gossamer threads floating by in a dream, there could be an ending that ties all of this together, but really the only ending is the one where we don’t get to know what happens after.