Dating : I Almost Died.

Driving in Australia,
Everything is fine.

It’s a typical Sunday morning: black coffee with 3 sugars for me, and peppermint tea with 5 sugars for her. We walk outside and I shiver saying “Ooh. It’s icy out today”. We get in the car and head to a city 42 minutes from home. We see a couple friends play ball, catch my friend visiting from out of state an uber to the city, and I make my way back to Ringwood to teach kiddos ten and under how to dribble a ball; the next generation of Ringwood hawks.

I am driving back along the highway, rain spitting on my car, clouds hovering closer and closer to the asphalt. 3 minutes away. I am almost there. I take the Ringwood bypass, flowing with the road, turn my wheel slightly to the left

And my car leans a little to the right.

I realize that the car and the steering wheel are in a domestic fight, and they just not listening to each other. So I offer some kind encouragement, pull a touch left, the car veers right. I tug right, and my car fishtails left. After a violent bout of back and forth, finally, the car picks a direction to drive in. The aim is straight into a concrete block barricading the highway.

Freeze Frame.

I have watched this episode. I’ve seen this version of my life:
Ten years a cutter, I spent my sunny Arizona days imagining all the different ways my life could end. Depression is a helluva lifestyle. My youth was focused in fantasy, changing every day occurrences into prayers for a finale, the kind that doesn’t wreak havoc and distress in the lives of loved ones.

So that little metal fence holding the road back from the rampage of the mountain, I have seen that edge broken. I have pictured falling from the highest sky scrapers, I have cried myself to sleep, wondering if it was actually possible to die from dehydration. Ten years a cutter, and flying head first into a concrete barrier is the least creative end to my life I ever imagined.

And yet..

One second before, bracing for impact, I think
“But I’m happy. I don’t want to die anymore”.

I almost died today. I hit the concrete barrier on the side of the road after my car fishtailed in the middle of the bypass with no witnesses, no cars around. I was terrified; so scared that as soon as the car spun and smacked into the wall, I jumped out the door, scrambled up the wall I just bashed into and threw up on the side of the road. I remember feeling the rain spit on my head as the cold seeped into the burns on my arm and bruises across my body, watching as two women stopped their cars ahead of mine. I wasn’t sure if I was alive, my heart beating out of my chest with so much force, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
No one knows that yet.

I believe that things happen for a reason. I believe that the universe has a way of unfolding exactly as it should. I am trying to find solace in the fact that even though I have a burned arm from the airbag, even though my nerves are shot, and my anxiety has accomplished a new level of 1–102182173, even though I could have died.. I realized in a split second that I no longer want to. I understand without a doubt in my mind that I am exactly where I want to be, with the people I want to be with, doing exactly what I want to do.

And I am thoroughly, utterly and positively happy.

I am the woman I needed when I was younger.
And though I may not sleep for a few months,
I think 12 year old Megan Elaine would be proud of who we became.