Reverb10 Day 3

Prompt: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

This prompt is a hard one for me because at first I really couldn’t even think of anything. Then I remembered the feeling I had after my car accident. I think the accident may have scared the life back into me in a way. It made me realize just how easy it would be to have your life end in a blink, or to have the life of someone you love end. In May this year we were driving back from my mom’s wedding. We’d been camping so I was pulling the camper with us. The camper caught wind and started to sway bad, and I’m not an inexperienced driver or anything but I had never had this happen while pulling a camper before. I looked in the side view mirror to see the camper had swung right around sideways. It snapped the hitch, rolling itself completely over once and landing on it’s side blocking off both sides of the highway. Our truck rolled twice,ending up in a ditch on it’s wheels. It happened so fast that everything was a blur of trees, highway and vehicle interior. I knew it was coming about a split second before it did. My first thoughts of course went to the kids. Were they ok, were they bleeding, were they scared, did they stay in their car seats? Thank god we had them in car seats!

The man jumped out of the truck pretty fast and ran up to the camper because the propane tanks had been jeopardized and you could hear the one hissing away leaking propane everywhere, which could be a very bad thing in an accident. There were instantly people everywhere helping me by watching the kids and making sure I was ok (I was almost 8 months pregnant). The camper was officially blocking off all traffic so after the propane tanks were closed off, he jumped into the truck, started it and miraculously drove it out of the ditch, he used it to push our trashed camper to the side enough that the traffic that had backed up could get through before the police sealed the road off. We were about a kilometer out of the nearest town, so it didn’t take long to hear the sirens from the police cars, the fire trucks and the ambulance coming. I remember hopping into the ambulance and having them check out the cuts down my arms, and check my blood pressure and all my vitals and thinking to myself how it was so weird to be in that position when we’d ben just so happy and carefree 2 hours earlier when we were in the city shopping, or the day before when we left a nice weekend of camping with the family. One instant, one mistake was all it took to wipe all those nice happy memories out of our minds for days.

It reminded me how fragile life is, and how all those things you want to do in the future but keep pushing off might never get the chance to actually happen. It made me live more in the now, made me want to actually LIVE more. Not just sit around and wait for something good to happen to me by magic, but to try to make things happen, to have more fun, to do more. It made me feel very grateful to be alive, and helped to remind me that you shouldn’t waste the life you’re given.