Zombie

I head back to Des Moines. Another greyhound bus, another city. My sister is going into labor. Maybe by the time I arrive. I’m sad to leave my friend, but it is different this time. I am different this time. I’m excited about this new life I’m leading, feeling energized about the new start and ready to get it into full swing. Ready to be happy once again. It’s a strange thing how you have to be ready for happiness, that it’s not enough for it to just be present, you actually have to be willing to take it in, to seize it and hold onto it with all your might. I haven’t been ready. Wasn’t willing.

For some time now, and I just found this recently, I have been feeling . . . well, I’ve been wandering about like I was pretty much dead already. I can only explain what I mean through story, and this is one I’ve been needing to tell for far too long now. I’ve alluded to it. And if you haven’t noticed, fallen completely apart over it and subsequently/concurrently kicked myself over it. But I can’t write the next part until I tell this story. About the accident I was in last year.

We were crossing a bridge. Two lanes. Completely iced over. A tractor trailer was about to enter the bridge at the other end, coming toward us. We watched him come down the hill, his trailer fishtailed into our lane. There was nowhere to go as he overcorrected. My fiancé (at the time) tried to avoid him, but we were sliding on the ice too. Into his lane. Just as he got himself back on track. For a moment, I watched the grill of a tanker bearing down on me as we slid sideways toward him. Fifty feet. Then twenty. Then death.

But we were out of it. In the next instant, she had pulled us out of it. We slammed into the side of the bridge and came to a stop. Finally took a breath. Contemplated sunlight. Then I heard it. The pop, the sound that occurs when two hurtling masses try to occupy the same space. And fail. My fiancé witnessed it in the rearview mirror. The car behind us sliding on the same patch of ice, too close to the semi. Matter becoming other matter. I was spared all but the sound. That sound.

There is more to tell, but as I said, I need to write the next part. This story is about all that came after – not the death, not the guilt, not even the second semi that almost took us out as we made our way back home that day. This isn’t even about the way my fiance’s sobs played in my head for months afterward, how that second sound, of her crying softly in the seat beside me and the popping of the ice and gravel beneath the tires, was like I imagined the end would sound. Lonesome. Heartbroken.

This is about the moment when I faced the grill of a semi-truck, and didn’t let myself live to tell about it.

I had a panic attack a few weeks ago. Couple of months ago, I guess. It came on suddenly as I sat watching reruns and playing a game on the computer. Trying to occupy my mind which has been so cluttered. Too much in one space. Within minutes, I felt as though I was having a heart attack. The heart attack that was to end my life. I don’t know how long it lasted. I only know how intense it was, how real my fear, how I finally for the first time since that moment on the bridge,felt and told myself what I should have then.

I am not going to die like this.

I repeated it over and over. Out loud to no one. Only the bright blue walls of the living room. After telling myself not to pass out (because I was certain that as soon as I lost consciousness, it would all be over) and fumbling through my phone for several minutes, watching the edges of the room go fuzzy and dark, thinking these blue walls would be the last thing I would see, I got in touch with Manny, who talked me through it.

As soon as the tingling in my chest went away and the room came back into view, I let him hang up and I went upstairs to lie in my bed. Now that I knew I wasn’t dying. And I cried. For an hour or more, I wept, sobbed, screamed a few times. For the woman on the bridge, who was killed instead of me. For the woman I loved who was forever changed by that day. For the woman I was before I stopped living.

In the moment that I watched the grill of the semi loom ever closer, I thought I was going to die. I have known it all along. I thought that moment was my end, but I only thought it. Believed it. Understood it. I just did not feel it. I’ve spent the last year or so trying to intellectualize, trying to think my way through. Emotionally, I have been in shock. Unable to move beyond that moment and unable to conceive of a future beyond today. It’s difficult to believe in anything when you feel you are pretty much dead already.

My fiancé, when she was still my fiancé, before she found herself engaged to a zombie, once told me (many times) that she was worried about me. She told me to go into the bedroom, shut the door and cry it out. I never did. I would say that I was afraid to do it, and it’s probably a little bit true, but it seems ridiculous considering the amount of time I spent in tears since then. I just didn’t think I needed to cry over the accident. I knew what had happened. I knew it wasn’t our fault. I knew what survivor’s guilt was and post-traumatic stress. I knew that all of it was just how the world works.

 I just forget sometimes that you can’t understand the world just by knowing about it, sometimes you have to feel it too. I know it might sound strange, but it took me a long time to learn that lesson. You would think it would be innate, especially to someone who fancies herself this amazingly sensitive writer, but I had to learn how to stop suppressing things and actually feel them. I’d spent much of the first thirty years of my life keeping it all bottled up until things exploded.

Then I met this girl. Who thought I was a brilliant writer (so we immediately became best friends) and who thought I could be an even better one if I actually felt the shit I wrote. Trying to become a better writer, I became a better person. I’d forgotten that lesson, and all sorts of other ones lately. I got lost somewhere, pushed off my path somewhere on an icy bridge. But I am finding my way back. It’s easier now that I’m alive.

I head back to Des Moines. Say goodbye to my friend. Ten years later and we are still as close. Proof that time still passes, will continue to pass. I board another greyhound bus, head for another city. The bus is full, loud. The guy sitting beside me yells into his phone and someone bumps my chair yet again, but I don’t care. Put on my headphones and watch the skyline as it morphs from city to suburb. I feel that tingling again, but it’s not the same this time. I recognize it. Life surging through my veins. It’s a strange thing how you have to be ready for happiness, that it’s not enough for it to just be present, you actually have to be willing to take it in, to seize it and hold onto it with all your might.