The request was harmless enough: pick up a bag of double filling Oreo cookies at the grocery store up the street. Happy to run the errand for a friend allowing me stay at her house during the Christmas holiday, I volunteered to go buy the cookies. Anyway, that night we both craved eating Oreos on the back porch, facing a pretty lake and hospital for race horses allowed outside in the mornings to graze and run.
My car was parked by rows of self-standing mailboxes where visitors to the well-maintained but nondescript community of townhouses in Pembroke Pines kept their cars overnight. The four-door Ford sedan was borrowed from my ex-husband. All had made it possible for me to visit my college-age children who were also in Florida for the holidays. My original intention was to fly the kids to Maine, where I had lived for the last three years, but my ex treated me to the airline ticket, so I returned to a state I no longer felt a connection to or affinity for, a place where everything from the constant heat and lack of change in seasons and opportunities, both professional and personal, had once made it the perfect recipe for my feeling stuck.
But that was in the past:
my divorce was over, my relationship with my ex had simmered to a friendship,
and friends, once baffled and irritated by my decision to move up North,
now treated me like a friendly ghost, no longer a threat or reminder of secret needs to shake and rattle their own sleepy lives -- like I had done to mine years before. All this lack of emotion for my return visit made
for a quiet, peaceful trip with my children: we hiked panther trails in Big
Cypress and walked paths of various Everglade habitats at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in
Naples. There was also Christmas
shopping and eating perfectly fried Chicken, fun Dim Sum, and cake-sized donuts
in restaurants around town. The trip was fun and carefree until the
night I went out for cookies.
I told my friend I would be right back, grabbed my keys, and walked out the front door. My intention was to stop at the recycle bins to the discard the plastic bags from the Christmas shopping done with the kids earlier that day. The four king-size bins had their own designated area, right off the narrow road running through the community and besides the steel trash containers sectioned off by gates with locks. I stopped the car, or thought I did, along a small patch of grass belonging to the corner townhouse with its back to the public disposal area, stepped out, lost my balance, and rolled onto the road while the car continued in reverse.
My face was squashed into the black tar road. "What’s happened?" My mind whispered innocently, as if I wasn’t in real danger, as if divine providence had simply pushed me into an adventure I was originally afraid to take or did not know existed. The adventure? Dangling like a circus acrobat beneath the pavement in a space between reality and darkness, as evidence of my torpid thoughts. Except, the car was moving steadily at 3 to 5 miles an hour and the opened driver's door pushed me with it.
Death wanted me, and it didn’t seem so terrible to allow it to pull me in, mangle me, and crush me under the weight of tires and steel. Sure, it sounded horrible, but it was happening regardless of how I felt about it. And here's something else about death: it felt as natural and casual as going out for cookies -- no signs of scythes, skulls, bones or angels waiting in the distance. Death was as easy as getting in my car, shifting into the wrong gear, falling out on the road, and getting caught in the tires. Life had slipped in a terrible accident as easy as it did any other experience.
As a matter of fact, death was personal and attentive, albeit violent, but how else was it going to take my life? In the expanse of several seconds, my thoughts became expansive and clear in a three way dialogue between me, life, and death. Life was the immediate past I couldn't remember or care about -- a quest for Oreos, Christmas shopping with the children. Death was the present – the silly car beeping into making me believe it was "parked" but was actually trying to run over me over and drag me down the street. Yet, I had the final say in all of this. I knew that much: I had the power to choose life or death, and even though life was familiar, death was not that foreign. Except... I was not supposed to die that night – my instincts told me so -- and even death needed permission to claim me. It's funny, I only mentioned God once. He was out of it, this was my choice.
“No, no, no,” I screamed out into the lonely night with Christmas lights flashing on cherry hedges and palm trees. “No, no, no,” I screamed as I rocked back and forth trying to free myself from the road. In my fetal position, I saw the left front tire from underneath the open driver’s door with its thick black rubber, grooves, and squiggly threading move regardless of what was in its path. “No, no, no,” I screamed when realizing I was in its path. All the rocking back and force pulled me under the car door, squashing my left elbow and pushing my ribs, buttocks and legs onto the road, giving me road burns on my elbows and legs. The overwhelming pressure and release set my torpid mind in motion once again: Was that the tire that ran me over? That didn’t feel so bad. Being dead doesn’t feel so bad. For a moment, I rested on the road. But just as quickly, I sprang to my feet, chased down the car, and put it in park.
I was bruised, cut up, and swollen, as confirmed later by x-rays in the emergency room. Later when the pains came, I realized the horrific extent of my accident. I also realized that death was as easy as taking a step to the left instead of the right. Read my exciting memoir, https://www.amazon.com/Continent-Ruby-Memoir-Because-sometimes-ebook/dp/B00TT5DDWO?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0
I told my friend I would be right back, grabbed my keys, and walked out the front door. My intention was to stop at the recycle bins to the discard the plastic bags from the Christmas shopping done with the kids earlier that day. The four king-size bins had their own designated area, right off the narrow road running through the community and besides the steel trash containers sectioned off by gates with locks. I stopped the car, or thought I did, along a small patch of grass belonging to the corner townhouse with its back to the public disposal area, stepped out, lost my balance, and rolled onto the road while the car continued in reverse.
My face was squashed into the black tar road. "What’s happened?" My mind whispered innocently, as if I wasn’t in real danger, as if divine providence had simply pushed me into an adventure I was originally afraid to take or did not know existed. The adventure? Dangling like a circus acrobat beneath the pavement in a space between reality and darkness, as evidence of my torpid thoughts. Except, the car was moving steadily at 3 to 5 miles an hour and the opened driver's door pushed me with it.
Death wanted me, and it didn’t seem so terrible to allow it to pull me in, mangle me, and crush me under the weight of tires and steel. Sure, it sounded horrible, but it was happening regardless of how I felt about it. And here's something else about death: it felt as natural and casual as going out for cookies -- no signs of scythes, skulls, bones or angels waiting in the distance. Death was as easy as getting in my car, shifting into the wrong gear, falling out on the road, and getting caught in the tires. Life had slipped in a terrible accident as easy as it did any other experience.
As a matter of fact, death was personal and attentive, albeit violent, but how else was it going to take my life? In the expanse of several seconds, my thoughts became expansive and clear in a three way dialogue between me, life, and death. Life was the immediate past I couldn't remember or care about -- a quest for Oreos, Christmas shopping with the children. Death was the present – the silly car beeping into making me believe it was "parked" but was actually trying to run over me over and drag me down the street. Yet, I had the final say in all of this. I knew that much: I had the power to choose life or death, and even though life was familiar, death was not that foreign. Except... I was not supposed to die that night – my instincts told me so -- and even death needed permission to claim me. It's funny, I only mentioned God once. He was out of it, this was my choice.
“No, no, no,” I screamed out into the lonely night with Christmas lights flashing on cherry hedges and palm trees. “No, no, no,” I screamed as I rocked back and forth trying to free myself from the road. In my fetal position, I saw the left front tire from underneath the open driver’s door with its thick black rubber, grooves, and squiggly threading move regardless of what was in its path. “No, no, no,” I screamed when realizing I was in its path. All the rocking back and force pulled me under the car door, squashing my left elbow and pushing my ribs, buttocks and legs onto the road, giving me road burns on my elbows and legs. The overwhelming pressure and release set my torpid mind in motion once again: Was that the tire that ran me over? That didn’t feel so bad. Being dead doesn’t feel so bad. For a moment, I rested on the road. But just as quickly, I sprang to my feet, chased down the car, and put it in park.
I was bruised, cut up, and swollen, as confirmed later by x-rays in the emergency room. Later when the pains came, I realized the horrific extent of my accident. I also realized that death was as easy as taking a step to the left instead of the right. Read my exciting memoir, https://www.amazon.com/Continent-Ruby-Memoir-Because-sometimes-ebook/dp/B00TT5DDWO?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0
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