First Thoughts in a Car Wreck

Through the fragmented windshield I can see different people swooping in and out of the scene. I’m the only one left in the cab of the crumpled racecar yellow pick-up truck. Frantic faces of women with confused, panic stricken expressions. They look as if they don’t want to alarm me but just can’t help themselves.

“Oh my God, she’s impaled,” one woman says loud; too loud- I don’t want to know that truth. Why can’t I continue to believe that my pelvis is merely broken and the fence post is tightly pinning me in the uncomfortably dangling bare- footed pose?

No matter how I squirm, I can’t break the death grip the two-by-six has against my foolish nineteen-year-old body. The body I was never extremely fond of and now it wasn’t going to ever be the same. There would always be the chunk of missing bone from my pelvis that wouldn’t be returned or even mentioned again by any doctors. The hole the board would leave in my stomach and lower back would only be sealed by time and many bandage changes; no stitches would ever be sown where the wood tore through my soft susceptible body.

I’m thoroughly upset at the inconvenience the whole situation places me in. The pain reverberating through my bones is like a wild violin song with the strings being rubbed vigorously and repetitively. Vaguely I can see the blood on my arms, but it seems insignificant, it’s dripping from my hair down my forehead and I can see a dark maroon circle forming where the strange pinning board has me in its grasp. The blood ring on my Levi’s cut-off shorts doesn’t look like enough to really be concerned with; it’s kind of camouflaged in its dark red mingling in the dark blue.

The thing that’s irking me most is that I’d just customized the shorts a few days earlier with shiny green sequins following along the edges of the pockets. I’d be mad at the loss of those shorts for a very long time. At the hospital they handed my clothes in a bag to my family. My mom, brothers and sister took them to the rusty burn barrel made from a 55 gallon drum in the back yard of my mom’s house. They later told me that they stood there and cried as they tossed my black bikini and shorts into the flames. Apparently there’s something mournful about your loved ones blood and excrement encrusted clothes that makes you happy she survived.

I just want out of the cab of the small Chevy S-10. I want us to get on with the plan that was moving along so smoothly, albeit a touch too fast. We are going to the ocean; we don’t have time for a car wreck. A small one- fine, I’ve been in enough of those. I do not want to be stuck in this smashed beer can of a truck with my life hanging in some sort of you’re-too-far-from-the-hospital limbo. I have a brown paper sack of illegal fireworks from the Rez, and I want my California friends to see how beautiful bottle rockets are exploding in the waves.

And my body wants to give up.

But I can’t.

 I want more than life itself to be cut out of the wreckage. I continuously tell anyone who gets in my vision from behind the half busted out glass crystals.

“Cut me the Fuck out!” It’s like my disgusting new tunnel vision mantra. It seems like a simple solution; I’m impaled inside of a truck, board all the way through me and plunged firmly into the seat behind; cut me out. Eventually it happens, but it’s not as easy as all that. When you're nineteen everything seems easy until the day it isn't anymore.