We try not to crash... but we still collide

It was a late afternoon, the sun was long gone and the rain was pouring. I was tired and worn out. After a long day at work the drive home seemed endless. Maybe my mind had wondered off or I just wasn’t paying attention but within seconds my car found its way to the other lane. I swerved quickly as bright headlights flashed.

There I was on a Monday afternoon, in the pouring rain, at 8 pm, completely spinning out of control. And though the wheel was in my hands I didn’t quite know where I was going. And just before I was about to hit the side rail it all stopped, my car, the sound of screeching wheels, maybe even my heart. I had come to sudden halt right before crashing.

I sat there with my eyes closed, shaking from head to toe, slowly I felt my blood rushing back in, and my heart began to beat again. I frantically looked all around me and nothing had really happened. I didn’t crash into anyone, nor made anyone crash into any one else. But if you’ve ever been in a similar situation you know you still can’t shake the feeling like you just did. Regardless I straightened up, let out a deep sigh and found my way back home.

Later that night as I was in bed going over in my head everything that had happened that day I couldn’t help but still feel shaken. I found it silly that after two years of being terminally ill many times, and having survived through all of that miraculously, my life could have ended within seconds thanks to something completely irrelevant.

But I suppose that’s life… We spend most of it trying desperately not to crash. Letting what happens not strip us down to where we have nothing left. But at times it doesn’t matter if you take all precautions, if all your air bags are turned on, sometimes we still collide.

Most of the time it happens in an instance. We make decisions that eventually lead to heart breaking consequences and we choose paths and directions that lead us down dark and rainy days. I suppose even if our whole lives were mapped out with arrows pointing us down the right paths we would still find a way to get lost. And when you hold the wheel, and you don’t know where you are going, no time or space will help the reality… you’ve lost all direction.

Reality is startling that way; it can shift the ground beneath you. Shake your faith right where you stand and make you question everything you ever thought you knew. When it comes to love, it’s no different. When love fails, especially when you had no say in the matter, you find yourself stripped and bare… left with nothing. A traveler, lost, with no sense of direction. Nothing hurts deeper than when the person that you trusted the most breaks your trust, breaks your belief system, breaks your heart. The wounds and the pain it creates is nothing you can protect yourself from. Because no matter how much you believed, how many castles you painted in the sky, and how many happy endings you found yourself writing all of a sudden it feels like you are spinning out of control. And with no end in sight… you find yourself terribly afraid.

You can’t drive away from this scene no matter how much you want to. The damage has been made. You are left exposed, trembling, and completely vulnerable to the turmoil that is deeply cutting into your heart. It is then when you will cry more tears than you’ve ever cried and feel more pain than you’ve ever felt.

There’s no real advice to how to deal with this kind of incident, every heart is different just like every situation. Many witnesses with different versions of the story. But even when we are torn to pieces, we have nothing to do but sit and wait to be made whole again. And though in the wreckage of it all we find ourselves shaken we must begin somewhere.

Through all the tears and the rain… we have to restart our engines. Look forward and hope that eventually we will stop shaking, that our blood will begin to flow, and that our hearts will begin to beat again. And that with time we will find our way once again.