I woke up early, feeling self loathing and regret.
I couldn’t help feel “what if?”
“What if… I had been going a little more slowly?”
“What if… I had left work later?”
“What if… I had changed lanes earlier?”
Thinking like this made me feel shitty – I couldn’t change anything it had already happened. Unlucky for me, it was a case of wrong place, wrong time.
As I knocked back a few pain killers and looked out on my drive to see my car smashed up at the front and back. I felt like crying, my perfect car that I had been so carefully with to look such a mess.
“You won’t be the first in an accident and you certainly won’t be the last” said Vicky to reassure me.
The shock of being in such an accident on the motorway had made me cry. It had made me think about Vicky and I thought of more “what ifs”.
“What if the car behind me had been going faster?”
“What if it was a lorry that had gone into me?”
This made me worry if I would even have been alive. But there was no point thinking about the “What ifs” anymore. It just wasn’t healthy. At the end of the day I had managed to get away with a minor whiplash.
My body hurt. I think it was more from imagination than injury from the accident.
So I did all the irretating things with a car accident – ring the insurance company, take my car down for repairs. All the things that you would rather not do, but have to because of the unlucky circumstance I found myself in.
The British can be so polite even in a car accident. The guy who drove into the back of me even said
“…it was nice meeting you, shame it was in a motorway accident.”
Although I was down, I couldn’t help but laugh at that comment.
Then after I dropped the car into the show room, my concerns turned to money. I have wedding costs and I was looking at paying off the remaining balance on my car. But I guess that will have to wait. Least it was not my fault, so I would get the excess back at some point.
I thought about my car. I even gave it a stupid name “Boxy Brown” which makes it almost seem like a person.
But then Vicky points out, it isn’t. And as I sit there feeling sorry for myself. She says:
“You’re not dead and you haven’t killed anyone. The only thing damaged is your car and that doesn’t matter. That can be fixed. The important thing is your all right.”
And she’s right.
When things go bad for me, Vicky is always there to support me.
This is just another scrape I have been able to walk away for.
And when the new day comes. I guess I will have to get the train.
Perfect Manifesto 