Speaking With Tongues

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight,In Which I Am Crushed, Again

Even though I was angry, my anger was mostly drained by another feeling. I felt let down. Kind of sad and shocked, and I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel or to react. Like when you’re stunned and you don’t really feel the pain right away, but you sure as heck know you’ve been stunned.

Now, I wouldn’t have admitted this to myself at the time, but I think that just as much as I hated what happened, I was also sort of glad it did happen. It really gave me an excuse to do what I had been thinking of doing ever since I had that little lob with Aidan, but I never had the courage of doing. It was like I had been standing on the edge of a cliff for some time, just waiting for a little wind to make me tip over, so I could put the blame on the wind. That’s what I decided to do as I was driving away from that terrible church- I decided to let this be the little wind that pushed me. Or, if you will, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

At the time, I didn’t really know what that all meant, I just knew it meant something drastic, and I knew it had to start with my stopping attending that damn church.

I was all crazy with thoughts and emotions, crying hysterically at this point, so I wasn’t really paying attention to where the heck I was driving. I wanted to go home, and I was heading in that direction, but I suddenly realized that I had passed the street I needed to turn on. Then something crazy happened. I’m not a crazy driver or anything-I’m aggressively defensive and pretty good at it, really- but I suddenly did something only a crazy driver would have done. Without even thinking about it, I just slowed downabruptly, on this wide, main road, and pulled a yoo-ee. Just like that. There wasn’t any oncoming traffic from the other side, but I guess my slowing down caused some man driving up behind me to freak out and swerve to his left (way to his left- enough so that he was driving on the wrong side of the road), so by the time I made my 180 ̊ turn, the guy hit me straight on. It was pretty bad. I passed out from the impact, so I don’t really want to go into all the details of how I eventually got to the hospital, room 971, about an hour later. I mean, I guess all you really need to know is that both cars were smashed beyond repair and the other guy’s broken ribs and airbag crushed his lungs so he was on the critical floor, having his collapsed lung worked on. I was in a pretty awful condition myself. I have (had) this small stupid little Volkswagon that crumpled like aluminum foil on impact.

Anyway, when I woke up, although I could hear a million other things, like doctors demanding and nurses chirping and all sorts of medical jargon, all I could really hear and focus on was my breathing. I woke up with this huge, long inward sigh like I just took my first breath in days, then I maintained pretty drawn-out, heavy breaths. I had that mouth-mask on my face pumping oxygen in me, and the way it made me breathe, I felt like god damn Darth Vader. I hated it, but there was nothing I could do about it. There was nothing I could do about anything, I couldn’t even move. I couldn’t do anything about the blood from my broken nose gushing and trickling down into my ear (it tickled the hell out of it, and I couldn’t do one damn thing about it, it drove me insane), I couldn’t do anything about my crushed knee that the nurse was poking all these needles in, I couldn’t do anything about the million bruises all over my torso that nobody cared about not poking.

My head was ringing and the rest of my body felt sore as hell. Every single inch of it was in pain. It’s funny, I used to always say “I feel like I got hit by a car,” when I’d have headaches or body aches or something. I really did feel like I got hit by a car, this time. But what was most palpable, above all that pain and noise, was this jarring shock that seemed strangely familiar, like it was a continuation of the shock I had felt earlier at church rather than a new one brought on by being smashed by hundreds of pounds of steel.

I started making some inconvenient movement when they tried to put some weird brace on my ribs, so the last thing I saw was this huge syringe going into my arm and knobs turned on the oxygen machine and I was sucked into empty, painless sleep again.