Winter is coming; or, BS's continued adventures in narrowly-averted disaster

To be filed under: things that could have turned out much worse than they did:

I am writing about this, first of all, because my mother asked me to. Last night I was in a car accident in which both cars were totaled. Thankfully, no serious injuries were incurred, either to me or the driver of the other car, but the experience shook me pretty badly. Everything happened very quickly, and I went immediately into shock, so my memory probably isn't to be trusted completely, but here is the sequence of events as I remember them:

Some friends from book club (more on that later) and I had made plans to hold a holiday party, and as my apartment is both large and centrally-located, I volunteered to host. The whole event was thrown together very hastily, so I had decided to drive over the grocery store after work. The weather was, as everyone who was in the Midwest last night knows, terrible: freezing rain transitioning into wet snow flurries, low visibility, and extreme darkness. As it was rush-hour, I decided to take a side street rather than the heavily-crowded intersection of three streets, where cars were backed up at least two blocks to the south. I paused at a stop sign and inched into the intersection to see whether there was any oncoming traffic, but I didn't see anything so I went through the sign. I didn't see the other driver until just before she smashed into the passenger-side front door of my car, so I must have missed seeing the car approaching because it was obscured by some larger vehicles to the right of the intersection. There was a loud metallic crunching and scraping sound and the sound of breaking glass, my glasses flew off my face, and I was knocked toward a row of parked cars. I don't remember much from the next few seconds, other than that I somehow managed to avoid hitting a parked car and pulled my vehicle to a stop in the oncoming traffic lane.

I had bought a six-pack of beer at the grocery store; in the collision, the bottles were shattered and beer was soaking into the floor-mat. I remember being very afraid that the police would think I had been drinking, since the car reeked of alcohol. Someone driving by who saw the accident pulled over and called the police, who sent a State Trooper to take witness statements. A friend who was going to attend the party at my house took a taxi to sit with me as I waited for the police report to be written up, and another drove over to pick us up after the car was towed. Apart from the very few vivid memories I have of those horrible two hours (listening to the rain through the gap created by the smashed door, a pedestrian stopping to ask for directions to the Oglivie train station, explaining the concept of the Assassin's Creed series to the friend who waited with me as the State Trooper prepared the accident report to distract myself from the fact that I was sitting in a totaled car waiting for someone to come take it away), the entire experience is very much a blur.

I have only been in one other serious car accident in my life, when I was 17 and backed my Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight into an irrigation ditch during a blizzard, then crawled out of the door and up through the snow to sit on the side of the road as I shook and rocked back and forth. It doesn't feel real. The only confirmation I have, the things I keep going back to to re-ground myself in reality, are the photos I took of the damage as I waited for the tow, the fact that my car is no longer parked on the street, and a soreness on the left side of my body where, I assume, I was slammed into the driver's side door by the force of the impact. The woman driving the other car was not too badly injured; her airbag deployed, and the only injuries she suffered (at least, that she told me about) were scrapes on her face and some bruising on her chest from the force of the bag hitting her. Opa's Camry, which my family bought from him when I was finishing high school, is most likely finished. Mom says that the fact that my injuries were so limited must be due, in part, to the fact that he is still keeping an eye on me, even now that he's gone. I don't know that I believe in an afterlife or that the people we love continue to watch us after they're gone, but what I do know is that this accident could have been much, much worse than it was, and that the fact that no one was badly hurt is a small miracle. And, oh, there are the tears I've been waiting for the last 24 hours. I suppose that means the worst of the shock is over, and I can start to process what has happened.