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***
Ten years earlier, when I was twenty-one, a similar anger stared back at me from bleary eyes in the bathroom mirror of an interstate rest stop. Just moments before, I'd been waiting to die.
Amid the whizzing lights and helpless screech of brakes as my sedan had spun across the dark, rainy highway, I'd first registered shock, then fear. Finally, in the moment just before the side rail had brought my trajectory to an abrupt halt, a deep acceptance had settled over my brain.
I'd been overcome by a wave of awareness that this moment, no, now this one... would be the very last moment I'd ever notice. After that, everything would be just like it was for me before I was born, and there was no stopping it, there never had been any stopping it, and now it was here, and now it must be here, and now...
But death hadn't come. Not for me, anyway.
I'd been dropped off at this rest stop by the gruff driver towing my destroyed sedan to the nearest service center, both of us relieved that the other didn't want to make conversation. As the taillights of his tow truck disappeared into the rainy night, followed closely by the corpse of my car, I'd blinked back tears. I'd never felt so alone.
This rest stop wasn't too far from the off-campus apartment where I lived with another senior at the Rhode Island School of Design, an aggressively chipper acquaintance named Bethany. When I'd called to tell her that I'd totaled my car, she'd agreed to come pick me up at this rest stop along a highway outside of Boston. It would probably take her about an hour to get here, if she left Providence right away.
Standing beneath the cement overhang beside a broken vending machine, I'd begun to shiver uncontrollably. When I'd noticed the garish yellow light shining from beyond the open door of the women's restroom, across the breezeway, I'd moved toward it because I thought if I stood in one place any longer, my entire body might combust.
The restroom was tiled floor to ceiling in small, pale yellow squares. Three pedestal sinks were peeling away from the wall to my left, across from a row of stalls. A plastic baby changing table attached to the wall ahead of me hung at a precarious tilt, its red strap dangling uselessly. A few feet up the tiled wall above it, a foggy, glazed window was sealed permanently shut.
With one of my left fingernails, I absentmindedly picked at the cuticle around the thumb on the same hand. The sting of dirt rubbing against raw skin brought my attention to my hands, which were caked with a layer of filth. Relieved to have something to do with myself while I waited for Bethany to show up, I walked over to the closest of the three sinks and placed my hands beneath the automatic sensor.
I couldn't avoid seeing my reflection in the slightly warped, wall-length mirror nailed into the tiles above the row of sinks. The anger in my own eyes surprised me. What had I expected to see there? Fear, I guess. I'd never come so close to dying as I had that night, so it would've made sense to feel afraid. Or sorrow, given the reason I'd crashed my car in the first place. But anger?
