(Heavy shit, reader beware)
Mercaptan
A car crash is a very vivid string of moments, ripe with pure, blasting physical and emotional feelings. Pain. Fear. Panic. Loss of control. It's nothing like in the movies, where everything becomes slow and melodramatic. By the time you've realized you were in a car accident, it's over. In fact, in a car crash, things speed up to a numbing, reckless blur. Control of your bodily functions is a crapshoot. The force of the vehicle flinging and moving in absurd directions causes your body to move, and for a few brief moments, you lose complete control of the physical world. You see flashcards of scenes, streamed together like a slide show, really fast. Images of your hand bracing the roof as the car flips. The mat on the floor. Squinting right after glass is blown into your face. Pieces of the car overtly jammed into your body, penetrating through your skin without warning as if it were soft Play-Doh.
And then, just like that, the forceful tearing of metal - easily the scariest sound I've ever heard - and all this universal confusion, it's over.
It's over before it began.
The car lost control in the rain, back wheels skimming across the water as the front tried to adjust. It flipped twice and then proceeded to roll down a 20-foot embankment off the side of the highway. Massive terror wrapped inside a tight ball of confusion.
And then the silence kicks in.
You're still strapped into your seat, even though the frame of the car is bent to shit. You taste microscopic pieces of glass in your mouth. They cause your gums to seep blood, the slight salty taste in your mouth is fumigating into your nostrils. You feel dirty, not mentally, but physically. The bits of glass have now forced you to keep your mouth open, as it lets the blood drain out of your mouth, rather than pool under your tongue and in your gums. The intoxicating smell of gasoline is the only comfort, and you can still hear the wheel humming furiously on the back right axel.
The CD player is frantically skipping, so much that the song is indistinguishable. The flickering green letters across the tiny black CD player read FULL COLLAPSE - TRACK 02. Guitars and voices are ripped, cut and pasted together in a psychotic mess of fidgeting music. You get so fed up you kick the dashboard until it stops, only to realize your left leg is broken. The pain is new, fresh, something you've never experienced before, and it's simultaneously numb and sharp. You can feel your leg bone shifting around your tendons and muscles right below your kneecap, scratching the fibers of veins, pockets of torn muscle filling with various damaging fluids.
You sit there, wrapped in a pain you can handle only if you remain perfectly still. But you can't, the imperfections of the seatbelt jammed into your intestines forces you to adjust. The head rest, which has been ripped apart, exposing sharp metal, is grazing the back of your skull.
You contemplate yelling, but don't, for two reasons. One, you think you may do internal damage by yelling and two, someone must've seen the accident going the other way on the highway and called 911.
You think to yourself in some odd realization, "I was just in a car accident."
Then you shift your head, slowly - watching the blood stream from your mouth all over your collar and your shirt like spilled paint - and check the back seat. Half of the rear of the car is outside the door, and the back tire on the driver's side is exposed. But no bodies, they've been thrown from the vehicle.
You try to cry to feel some type of normalcy, but the adrenaline and oxygen is still pumping, your blood still speeding, forcing your veins open, forcing your airways open so you can compensate with deep, staggered breathes.
You see a bottle of Polar Ice Vodka on the floor by the gas peddle - the one Sarah and you split that night. Somehow, the bottle never got smashed. You get a flash of a M.A.D.D. commercial, the one where the cop stops the kids for a suspected DUI, only to be hit by another oncoming drunk driver. You realize you're really not that powerful of a creature. A 4,097 pound car has power - you - do not. Death is now a lot closer and you see it with a new sense of introspectiveness. Death stopped by and said 'Hi'.
But your mind can't consciously not exist. You can't experience death; your brain cannot explain a world of non-existence.
You look over to your left. Sarah is beside you. She is dead. There is blood all over her. Her neck must be broken, her spine shattered in various places. You realize you are sitting beside a dead person. Someone who was alive moments ago. Someone who is somewhere now you will never know of until you die. You were intimate with this person. You were inside her. You were as close physically as anyone to her ever was. You think of her mom and her dad and her brother and her friends and her funeral and them crying and the fact that she is dead. It hits you so hard you are beyond shock - eerily calmed by your realization.
She's now slightly slumped over the steering wheel which looks like a twisted bicycle wheel which's just been run over by a truck. You see the keys in the ignition. Her blood - and possibly yours - is all over the dials and speedometer. She will be remembered for this mistake. She will not have a chance to make this wrong a right. Her family will remember her as their tragic daughter who killed two, possibly three people, and herself.
"Where did she go wrong" they will think. It was that boy she was hanging out with - that boy.
The fucking rain is everywhere, the sound and the feel, pounding as a collection.
I unbuckle her seatbelt and mine. My body feels like collected toothpicks jammed inside rolled ham, poking through the skin, broken and unorganized. I can feel bones everywhere they're not supposed to be. Blood begins to pour down her neck and I realize there is a large hole in the back of her head. With one giant thrust I pull her atop me. I can still smell her perfume. Her blood is all over me, I can feel it run down my pants and into my crotch. Once she is against the passenger's window I shuffle into the driver's seat. I break my arm in the process. I've never seen so much blood. It's surreal and somehow humbling in the sickest way possible.
I place her in the passenger's seat and do up her seatbelt and then do up my seatbelt. She's a heavy, lifeless doll with limbs everywhere. My hair is wet from what could be blood or gasoline or alcohol or sweat or rain. There is car and blood and dirt and the smell of gasoline everywhere. I prop her against the door. My head starts to rush as I sit in the driver's side, and when I spin the steering wheel to adjust my body the car crinkles and settles on a slant - a rustic sound of metal.
Then I can feel the blood inside me, rushing up into my head. I start breathing heavy. I start panicking.
I look at Sarah, I look behind me.
I faint.
And then it feels like a world of black, for what must be days.
Days of lucid hallucinations. Not dreams, not nightmares, but hallucinations of events as you sleep. Blackness as your thoughts cope with a bleeding brain.
Everything after is just as bad or even worse. You spend the better part of two weeks drifting in and out of consciousness. And every God damn time you wake up from a dream where you were somewhere else, not broken, the smell of disinfectant slams you back into reality as soon as you awake from your medically induced slumber.
Mercaptan
A car crash is a very vivid string of moments, ripe with pure, blasting physical and emotional feelings. Pain. Fear. Panic. Loss of control. It's nothing like in the movies, where everything becomes slow and melodramatic. By the time you've realized you were in a car accident, it's over. In fact, in a car crash, things speed up to a numbing, reckless blur. Control of your bodily functions is a crapshoot. The force of the vehicle flinging and moving in absurd directions causes your body to move, and for a few brief moments, you lose complete control of the physical world. You see flashcards of scenes, streamed together like a slide show, really fast. Images of your hand bracing the roof as the car flips. The mat on the floor. Squinting right after glass is blown into your face. Pieces of the car overtly jammed into your body, penetrating through your skin without warning as if it were soft Play-Doh.
And then, just like that, the forceful tearing of metal - easily the scariest sound I've ever heard - and all this universal confusion, it's over.
It's over before it began.
The car lost control in the rain, back wheels skimming across the water as the front tried to adjust. It flipped twice and then proceeded to roll down a 20-foot embankment off the side of the highway. Massive terror wrapped inside a tight ball of confusion.
And then the silence kicks in.
You're still strapped into your seat, even though the frame of the car is bent to shit. You taste microscopic pieces of glass in your mouth. They cause your gums to seep blood, the slight salty taste in your mouth is fumigating into your nostrils. You feel dirty, not mentally, but physically. The bits of glass have now forced you to keep your mouth open, as it lets the blood drain out of your mouth, rather than pool under your tongue and in your gums. The intoxicating smell of gasoline is the only comfort, and you can still hear the wheel humming furiously on the back right axel.
The CD player is frantically skipping, so much that the song is indistinguishable. The flickering green letters across the tiny black CD player read FULL COLLAPSE - TRACK 02. Guitars and voices are ripped, cut and pasted together in a psychotic mess of fidgeting music. You get so fed up you kick the dashboard until it stops, only to realize your left leg is broken. The pain is new, fresh, something you've never experienced before, and it's simultaneously numb and sharp. You can feel your leg bone shifting around your tendons and muscles right below your kneecap, scratching the fibers of veins, pockets of torn muscle filling with various damaging fluids.
You sit there, wrapped in a pain you can handle only if you remain perfectly still. But you can't, the imperfections of the seatbelt jammed into your intestines forces you to adjust. The head rest, which has been ripped apart, exposing sharp metal, is grazing the back of your skull.
You contemplate yelling, but don't, for two reasons. One, you think you may do internal damage by yelling and two, someone must've seen the accident going the other way on the highway and called 911.
You think to yourself in some odd realization, "I was just in a car accident."
Then you shift your head, slowly - watching the blood stream from your mouth all over your collar and your shirt like spilled paint - and check the back seat. Half of the rear of the car is outside the door, and the back tire on the driver's side is exposed. But no bodies, they've been thrown from the vehicle.
You try to cry to feel some type of normalcy, but the adrenaline and oxygen is still pumping, your blood still speeding, forcing your veins open, forcing your airways open so you can compensate with deep, staggered breathes.
You see a bottle of Polar Ice Vodka on the floor by the gas peddle - the one Sarah and you split that night. Somehow, the bottle never got smashed. You get a flash of a M.A.D.D. commercial, the one where the cop stops the kids for a suspected DUI, only to be hit by another oncoming drunk driver. You realize you're really not that powerful of a creature. A 4,097 pound car has power - you - do not. Death is now a lot closer and you see it with a new sense of introspectiveness. Death stopped by and said 'Hi'.
But your mind can't consciously not exist. You can't experience death; your brain cannot explain a world of non-existence.
You look over to your left. Sarah is beside you. She is dead. There is blood all over her. Her neck must be broken, her spine shattered in various places. You realize you are sitting beside a dead person. Someone who was alive moments ago. Someone who is somewhere now you will never know of until you die. You were intimate with this person. You were inside her. You were as close physically as anyone to her ever was. You think of her mom and her dad and her brother and her friends and her funeral and them crying and the fact that she is dead. It hits you so hard you are beyond shock - eerily calmed by your realization.
She's now slightly slumped over the steering wheel which looks like a twisted bicycle wheel which's just been run over by a truck. You see the keys in the ignition. Her blood - and possibly yours - is all over the dials and speedometer. She will be remembered for this mistake. She will not have a chance to make this wrong a right. Her family will remember her as their tragic daughter who killed two, possibly three people, and herself.
"Where did she go wrong" they will think. It was that boy she was hanging out with - that boy.
The fucking rain is everywhere, the sound and the feel, pounding as a collection.
I unbuckle her seatbelt and mine. My body feels like collected toothpicks jammed inside rolled ham, poking through the skin, broken and unorganized. I can feel bones everywhere they're not supposed to be. Blood begins to pour down her neck and I realize there is a large hole in the back of her head. With one giant thrust I pull her atop me. I can still smell her perfume. Her blood is all over me, I can feel it run down my pants and into my crotch. Once she is against the passenger's window I shuffle into the driver's seat. I break my arm in the process. I've never seen so much blood. It's surreal and somehow humbling in the sickest way possible.
I place her in the passenger's seat and do up her seatbelt and then do up my seatbelt. She's a heavy, lifeless doll with limbs everywhere. My hair is wet from what could be blood or gasoline or alcohol or sweat or rain. There is car and blood and dirt and the smell of gasoline everywhere. I prop her against the door. My head starts to rush as I sit in the driver's side, and when I spin the steering wheel to adjust my body the car crinkles and settles on a slant - a rustic sound of metal.
Then I can feel the blood inside me, rushing up into my head. I start breathing heavy. I start panicking.
I look at Sarah, I look behind me.
I faint.
And then it feels like a world of black, for what must be days.
Days of lucid hallucinations. Not dreams, not nightmares, but hallucinations of events as you sleep. Blackness as your thoughts cope with a bleeding brain.
Everything after is just as bad or even worse. You spend the better part of two weeks drifting in and out of consciousness. And every God damn time you wake up from a dream where you were somewhere else, not broken, the smell of disinfectant slams you back into reality as soon as you awake from your medically induced slumber.