Thoughts on Imminent Disaster
what ran through my mind as I waited to kill or die
This personal story/essay/reflection is a creative writing post (#23) from my occasional series for paid subscribers, who can also leave comments on most posts. As always, email hollymathnerd at gmail dot com if you would like a paid subscription but can’t afford one.
Context: I just got home from having dinner at my friend Josh’s house. On the way there, something bizarre happened, and I spent about thirty seconds expecting that one of three disasters was about to occur: either I would be badly hurt, I would die, or I would kill someone else.
Tonight, I got one of those pop quizzes life likes to throw at us sometimes, and I surprised myself by doing quite well.
I am much more inclined to rehearse my failures over and over, for years, than to pause and reflect on success, so I’m going to force myself to do the latter here.
What do I mean by “success”?
If, earlier today, someone had asked me this question:
“Holly, if you were suddenly and inexplicably put in a position where you had a completely reasonable expectation that you were either about to be badly hurt, die, or kill someone else—what thoughts would you want to have? What emotions would you want to experience? What would you like to have be true of you, in that terrible moment?”
I’m not sure what my answer would have been, but I’m sure of this: when it actually happened, I did better than I would have dared hope.
Much better, in fact.
Here’s what happened, and why, and what it was like.
Vermont is the Green Mountain state. When you populate a state full of mountains, you end up with a great deal of curvy, two-lane roads, many of them on hills.
I live near one such very dangerous stretch of road.