I got into my first car accident on Friday.
And if you know me, and you know stereotypes, it's a slight miracle that I've made it this far avoiding tickets and fender benders. But on Friday it happened.
I was driving home from Annandale. Annandale, like high school, like TJ, like football games, like basketball games, like lacrosse games, like homecomings, like proms, like syslab, like photography, like pressure, like stress, like psychopaths, like mean girls, like best friends, like McLean, like college, like Penn, like beach week, like ex-boyfriends, like first love, like heartbreak, like mistakes, like growing up, like seventeen-and-very-confused, like the adrenaline of recklessly breaking 110 mph on 495 just to "feel alive" (wow), like the familiar wide-set highways and green signs, brightly lit with huge white text "US-66W exit in 1 mile."Â And that was my exit.
I merged onto 66 west, just as I had every late night coming back from high school, and felt this overwhelming sense of who I used to be and everything that was important to me in high school and frustrated me, and angered me, and consumed me, and how everything that once was, was so ephemeral. So much had changed from seventeen to eighteen and even more from eighteen to nineteen, but surprisingly so much also hadn't, and maybe the worst hadn't changed, and that was the worst part, and I was wondering how much we change as people as years go by and more about the significance of this dumb word "change" and if we ever stop or if moments ever become less fleeting and what events shape us as people and if there's anything like forever in this life or is nothing ever static and then I peeked into my rear view mirror to check if my friend, who had become unnervingly quiet in the back seat, had fell asleep. Then I heard a screeching "MICHELLE" into my right ear and saw bright, breaking red lights in front of me and pressed my right foot as deeply into the peddle as I could. But it wasn't enough.
The past is haunting in ways I can't even begin to explain, and it shouldn't really be, but it was, and it is, and here I am, on the eve before returning from a much needed short hiatus to the real world bundled tightly under layers of blankets in the same twin sized bed I've slept on since I was five, wondering if how much of who we are now is who we once were and how long ago is who we once were. This doesn't make sense.
