You Are Not Invincible.

On a night with an incoming storm, I drove my friend and I to the gym. I was speeding and not paying full attention to my surroundings as I was also gossiping with her about what had happened earlier in my day.

As we approached the intersection before the gym’s plaza, I quickly realized that I didn’t have my headphones. I swerved into the left turn lane from the far-right lane so we could retrieve my headphones. I didn’t pay attention to the light. The solid green light allowed people in the left turning lane to yield to oncoming traffic and turn across the intersection. As I swerved, I followed the 2 cars in front of me that had turned a few seconds earlier.

In a split second, I heard my friend exclaim my name as cars came straight for us. I tried to swerve away from the cars but slammed into the rear end of the driver’s side of an SUV. The older man in the SUV swerved into a tree.

My ears ringing, the pressure surrounding my chest and hips, the metallic powdery scent, my friend screaming, and the blurred sight of my hands resting on a foggy airbag atop my steering wheel were engraved into my memory in a surreal second. I sat in a haze for a moment where I struggled to piece together what happened and why I didn’t see the cars. I couldn’t come to a conclusion, and today (almost a year later) I still can’t.

My friend’s screaming pulled me out of the haze. My confusion and regret faded as my concerns quickly surrounded her. I quickly got out of the car with shaking limbs to make sure she was okay. As I reached her on the passenger side of the car, she had her eyes squinted shut as blood dripped from her left eyebrow to her eye. I helped her out of the car as a police officer arrived and guided us away from the car to the median at the intersection. Before I followed the police officer, I found my phone on the floor of my car by the pedals. I hazily looked around my car where I saw (but didn’t process) small flames sprouting in the back seat of my car.

From the median, I saw smoke rise above the cop SUV which was blocking my view of my car. Abruptly, my car was engulfed in hot, bright flames which rose to two times the size of the cop’s SUV. Thus, all I saw was a deep, bright orange fire sprouting above the cop car which caused me to move to the side to see my car on fire. I began to sob as my first car went up in flames.

I watched as the firefighters tried to put the fire out before the police officer pulled me away so I couldn’t watch. Then, a couple of the firefighters loaded my friend and me into a fire truck to be taken to the hospital. In the truck, 1 of the 4 firefighters cleaned her eye, 2 others were collecting our information and vitals, and the fourth collected my information and suspected the cause of the fire.

The fire was a mystery to all of us during the incident, eventually, I discovered it was due to a faulty, recalled passenger airbag. When the airbag deployed, it exploded causing my friend to hit her head on the windshield, thus being the reason for the bleeding on her eyebrow. When the airbag exploded, shards of metal created a gash in my friend’s arm and created the fire.

Other than the fear of being in a car, I gained a heightened sense of gratefulness for life. However, when times got difficult, I would question if I had never gotten out of the car before it engulfed in flames, would life be better for the people around me. Though the thought was brief, I eventually got away from those thoughts, which was the moment that I began to be grateful for everything around me. The realization that there was more to life was what inspired me.

Today, I never drive without being cautious. I don’t feel a sense of security or safety when I am in a car, therefore I spend every waking moment trying to overcompensate for others while driving. Someday I hope that I don’t feel terror when a car comes a bit too close to mine.