by Yocheved Friedman
I envisioned myself dying on the way home today.
Right on the Palisades near exit 18, my car would veer to the right and jump the island into oncoming traffic. I’d hear the blare of a terrified driver, headlights drowning my retinas and the biggest explosion I’ve ever felt. My head would snap back at 55 miles an hour and that’s how I would die, on a Tuesday afternoon in a ten car pile-up.
I’d be responsible of course, they’d file me down in the police report as patient zero, the center of the disaster. People would glance at my smashed windshield, my body crushed between glass and the stain of red lights flashing from every emergency vehicle from the York/Jersey crossroads.
Investigators would guess I’d been distracted, maybe changing the radio station or visually impaired by the rain. They would gather my body last, after they’d triaged all the more important people, the people still alive, holding bruised heads, dying to escape the metal cages around them. After all the ambulances took off, carrying family members who have volunteered to accompany the critical and the dying, they would finally gather me up. I’d be carried out in a black body bag, whatever was left of me. Traffic would be at a stand-still for hours and people would remain cleaning up the mess I’d left for a long, long time.
That is exactly how I envisioned myself dying, always the same ten car pile-up on whatever highway I happened to be driving. The most vivid part is always the moment of impact. The loudest horn that carries me into death and my head snapping back against the driver’s seat right before I die.
Sometimes, I imagine that I’ve survived this time, that my body is carried away like the rest of them with oxygen necklaces and the urgency of flashing lights and my mind still alive, still above the surface of death.
But usually, on most occasions, I die every time still gripping the wheel, my foot pressing down on the break like I might have believed it could have saved me this night.
Driving alone in thoughtless air. Traffic sounds drumming on the windshield. All I can do is focus on the road and pump my own thoughts into the back seat amid the backdrop of lingering radio. Concocting scenarios of my death woven between threads of NPR and rain blurring the lights ahead of me.
I find that’s when thoughts are the most overwhelming, the most real versions of themselves, so potent that they can hardly fail to be real. Imagining the moment of impact at 55 miles per hour and the rain coming through my broken window when my car finally stops.
Wet fingers on the wheel. Wet metal wrapped around me and the pavement ironically shiny.
Pondering loudly on whether or not my thoughts have jumped ship and morphed into living moments that will strike me like a head-on collision, a sudden death so soon after I breathed them out. ‘Alone thoughts’ are the most dreadful ones, suctioned through a vacuum of empty space where there is nothing else to cushion their existence. No people, no countering minds racing to keep up, only the white noise of passing time. And rain setting in.
Highway driving. Envisioning my death and the overload of my thoughts heaping themselves onto the pavement like lost luggage. It’s nearly impossible to quiet a loud mind. A mind growing weeds of death and worry over tomorrow’s battles and today’s doubts.
Envisioning my death is really just a facet of thinking out loud in the rain, when everything is so clear and tiny droplets crowding my window resemble rare microbes and I swear I can see the hair line cracks in the pavement ahead and the craters on the forming moon. The rain making everything so focused, illuminating my mind with street lamps uncovering dusty trails and unwalked backroads. Moving this fast with just a trunk load of my thoughts and I’m surprised the vision of my death hasn’t nearly popped onto my lap from the AC vent overhead making me veer out of my lane into oncoming traffic.
All things being equal, a rain drenched death in a lonely metal cage with the radio still on as an afterthought is really the most beautiful kind there is.
