So it turns out that the upside to having your car get butt-raped by an SUV in broad daylight is that you don�t have to pay for the damages. An insurance adjustor came out today to take a gander at my poor, beat-up ass vehicle, and document the carnage with snapshots and little notes like, �rear fender busted all to hell�, and he said they�ll do whatever they can to expedite the whole car-fixing process. In the meantime, I have to contact the police to get the accident report, and then go to the DMV to fill out some forms, and then blah blah red tape blah.
Among the downsides to being the lettuce in the automotive version of a club sandwich is that it plays merry hell with your psyche. Immediately after the fact, I had neither the time nor the opportunity to indulge in the trauma; I was already late getting back to work, where I had to take care of all the daily faxes and run a phone conference with Jeanzilla, and then I had this thing on the other side of town right afterward�basically, I was never able to process what happened.
That night, I slept the sleep of the dead. If I dreamt, I don�t remember it at all. I woke up on the floor, my screen saver tottering genially across my monitor, waiting for me to finish the final edits to my diary entry, which I had begun before lying down �just for a moment�. When I officially got up about a half-hour later, I felt�strange.
The way I described it to people is thusly: you know how when you�ve heard a really loud noise -- say an explosion, or you�ve been mowing the lawn for the past hour -- and your hearing goes all fuzzy and muted for a while? That�s what my brain was like. I was listless, detached, unable to focus, and just plain off. When I spoke to people, it took me what felt like hours to come up with the words, not because I was at a loss for them, but because I would pause�and then couldn�t seem to ever get started again.
After making it through most of the morning this way, I felt things gradually beginning to worsen. I started getting shaky, I felt nauseous, and at one point I put my head down in the open drawer of a filing cabinet and couldn�t pick it back up again for ten minutes. Finally, during our afternoon staff meeting, I excused myself so I could go throw up, and decided maybe I should just go home.
I tried to sleep, but couldn�t. Every time I shut my eyes, I saw the strangest things; faces, people, colors�at one point, I was looking around my room, focusing on random objects and wondering what it was about them that made them seem unfamiliar to me, when I realized I still had my eyes shut tight. That�s when I started seeing the accident playing over and over again and felt ill. I got into the shower, and once there, I finally acknowledged what had been building up inside me for the past twenty-four hours: fear.
Somehow, being well on the other side of the incident, having had a chance to take stock of myself and realize I had really survived it, made me able to recognize that being in a collision was traumatizing. It�s that moment when, out of nowhere on a beautiful and sunny afternoon, you�re torn out of your peaceful thoughts in a split second of chaos, confusion, alarm, and pain. I had no idea what had happened to me, only that there was a noise so loud it was as if I could feel it reverberating through my skull, when in fact what I felt was the impact of my head on the headrest. In the end, no one was hurt (save for my sore neck and a little bruise from the aforementioned headrest), but the unexpectedness, the suddenness of that moment catalyzed a sense of panic inside that I hadn�t given voice to yet.
Well, believe me, once I was in the shower, I gave voice to it. I spoke with a nurse (whom I am lucky enough to know as �mom�), who said the symptoms I described sounded like a mild case of shock, which I suppose makes a lot of sense. It was like those feelings had been waiting for me to be ready, because they were all set to go the minute I let the door open. I let them do their thing, though, and when it was over, I think we all felt the better for it.
Tomorrow we may talk about how Sophie�s becoming less and less inconspicuous about her plan to get rid of me. I think the words, �I don�t want you to make up the hours you�ve missed� have a very final ring to them, don�t you?
Someone Got Here By Searching For: �is your refrigerator running� and �do you have prince albert in a can� And: rachael ray is evil [Oh, but she is!] I�m Watching: Karen Sisco. It doesn�t have Jake 2.0 delicious Christopher Gorham, but at least there�s sarcastic patter. I�m Craving: Donuts. Big, fat, greasy donuts.