Impact

Every so often it happens.

The location is usually a café; it seems to occur more often outside my home. I’d be sitting, reading the chosen material of the day (the material itself is irrelevant, whether if it’s school related or not), sipping my overpriced caffeinated beverage and trying to focus.

Then it happens.

My senses are heightened; I’d see and hear things clearer than usual. I begin to feel restless, and try harder to focus on the words on the pages.

Impact.

A sudden moment of hallucinated blunt force trauma… I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of my car; I see a vehicle – a motorbike, a sedan, even a truck (on a bad day) – ramming right into me. The collisions are usually either head-on or at an angle. T-bones are rare. The moment of impact always shakes me to the core, often causing me to get bit nauseas.

It’s as if I’m driving into a brick wall; or perhaps more accurate, a brick wall driving into me, shattering all of the car’s metal, plastic, and glass, and crumbling all of my bones. It’s like a piece of glass mirror slamming hard onto the sidewalk, or perhaps, more eerily accurate, a blind side open ice hit by Scott Stevens.

It is foolish for me to suggest it as a symptom of any medical condition. However, these occasional ‘impact’ incidents did not occur until my accident over 2 years ago.

The car was totaled, but I moved on, mentally and physically. Yet I feel like I’m being struck by an eighteen-wheeler every now and then, my car and body crushed into oblivion…

Sometimes the results of these impacts can get ugly (think Anton Chigurh in “No Country for Old Men”). My arm is snapped in two, almost. A dangling limp with blood and flesh splattered on my lap and the bone clearly visible, snapped unnaturally like a tree branch broken by bare hands.

Usually though, the feeling is usually more sick to my stomach. My lungs cringe. My ribcage collapsing on itself, to the point where I vomit blood.

And then, after those few seconds of lucid agony, all would once again be well. Calm. Peaceful.

Until the next Impact.