Crash

March 2026 — On November 8th, I flew into Minneapolis with my friend Sean to see Godspeed You Black Emperor. A few hours after landing, we met up with my lifelong friend Megan and her husband who was driving the four of us. We were downtown when another driver ran a red light and hit us, flipping the car. I exited the car struggling to breathe and went unconscious on the pavement. A bystander performed CPR on me and I was taken to the ICU with fractures in my lower back.

I wrote this three weeks later, still working through it physically and mentally. I wanted to capture both the sharp and fractured nature of my recollections and to come to terms with the random violence can arrive without warning, cause, or meaning.

We made the concert later that week, a bit worse for wear.

Originally written November 28, 2024

Measurements of time lose their meaning in times of crisis. It twists and condenses, not slowing but coiling tight, each instant made vast and unending.

There was a moment. Some sub-division of a second or millisecond in which your brain processes time faster - time doesn’t slow down but your awareness of it accelerates.

There was a moment. Between the resumption of gravity to normality and that same gravity beginning, again, to lose its integrity as the car begins to roll over a second time.

There was a moment. And you think “this is the end”. The frenetic haze is becoming a blur which may soon result in a darkness from which “I may not wake up”. This is the end.

How do you tell a story of chaos? There’s no preceding event that is the cause nor provides meaning to the disaster that comes after, no chain to hold onto. The woman who clips her nails in her bathroom as the bombs fall upon her, she has no tale to tell, no lesson to impart. A real moment of chaos, it cuts the tether, it breaks the bind.

Without connection, there’s no this then that, no sequence, no narrative. The story begins at the trauma and not when I cut her off at the brewery as she was preparing to tell what, from what I could discern, would be a lengthy story about her stepson’s grandmother’s recent troubles, confusion, and misallocation of that grandmother’s husband’s funds resulting in legal troubles that threatened jail time and certainly financial ruin where if that grandmother had simply allowed the funds to accrue properly she would have received them through the estate of her deceased husband. It is not the story of how I interrupted her, encouraged us to leave and for her to relay these events as we moved from point A to point B resulting in the precise timing so that we were placed in that intersection at that absolute and exact wrong time. It is not that story.

…or rather, I feel warmth. My son and I are stacking library books against an impossibly bright sky realizing the silly nature of the task and laughing to and at one another. The dream fades and gives way to real night sky, I feel loss and search for that dream again. I remember smiling - he seemed happy, we were happy.

And there, sound comes back to me in a gradient as if someone had steady hands on a fader - high frequencies are the last to return. Megan’s face is the first I see and she’s screaming murder but I can’t make out the words she’s saying, probably my name.

My brain begins to remember and comprehend before my body and my vocal chords are able to respond in kind. From a skyward vantage point on my back, I struggle for words and attempt to speak. I’m trying to communicate that I am alright, that they shouldn’t worry. I’m alright, I’m alright.

I find myself looking up, marveling like a child at the scale of towers, tickled at the absurd perspectives we take for granted. In a new city, my head is a swivel as buildings lean onto angles that don’t belong on the ground. Looking for edges that are unique or new to me - at old architecture that doesn’t exist in Jacksonville Florida - at new architecture that costs more than you’d see in Jacksonville Florida.

Megan points out something outside her window. Sean and I look - a building or landmark, I don’t recall. Our retinas processing, at that time, light from the car that will soon hit us. It is in a normal place on its side of the fence, completely unremarkable; that light being absorbed into our eyes - in its lane, in its place, nothing to notice.

A fraction of a second before impact at least two of us register the shift as that peripheral light source moves too fast and is too close. The car emerges into focus like a great white, someone screams, and our world breaks open, disjointed into a kaleidoscope of sharp lights, prisms, and mirrors.

The silence after the shelling is deafening. Status check - I’m ok, I’m ok, I’m ok… but I am not ok. The troupe doesn’t notice my sly omission. I struggle to breathe, I hope they don’t notice. We are upright, normality resumed. I reach for the door aching for air. Surprised that a welcome party was already in place, waiting there, looking in. And I go. I go out to them and I’m warm…