How tricky, the human mind.

[Warning: possible disturbing content, about the motorcycle accident I saw last April and especially about the car accident that I was in back in 1994.]

It's been almost eight months since the morning of the motorcycle accident I came across on my way to work--eight months tomorrow, in fact. For awhile there, it was part of my daily life, one of those things you see that just sticks with you and feels like it won't ever go away, that it'll be a constant part of your consciousness. I tried not to mention it much, because I felt...well, I'm not even sure I can describe how I felt. I think the easiest way to put it is that I didn't want people to think that I was overreacting, considering that the man in question wasn't someone that I knew at all. As if I didn't have the right to be disturbed by it.

It faded away, as things do, though there were flowers by the road for months. When we moved, I started taking a different way to work, and that, too, also served to push things farther away.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Borders in Milpitas for lunch, and drove by that spot on my way home. It struck me, then, how accidents and other traumatic events can really screw up one's sense of perception.

When I pulled over to the side of the road to call 911, I was only about 25 feet away, but in my memory of that day, it seems like I was so much more distant...half a block, a quarter, but not only twenty-five feet. It's short, that distance--small, covered in the blink of an eye when driving past it, but in my memory... I remember closing that distance, on the phone with the 911 operator, and that hurried half walk/half run seemed like it took forever, the road stretching out in front of me, like it would never end.

Time stretched, too--I would have ended up at the office about ten minutes early that day, but as it was, I was only five minutes late; my LJ post was started at 8:09am. And yet, thinking back on it, it felt like I was there for half an hour, maybe more...on the phone, waiting.

That's not the only time I've felt that strange perception shift, either.

Back in the latter half of 1994, my first husband, a friend, and I planned a camping trip down to Taos, New Mexico. We didn't make it that far. Dusk on a two lane highway in central/southern Utah, two semis, a minivan trying to pass them, and...

Picture this: it's just starting to get dark, you're cresting a hill on a two lane highway. Barrelling toward you in your lane is a minivan, the driver of which has misjudged the time it would take her to pass the two semis in her lane of traffic--the oncoming lane, for you. She has time to pull between them to let you pass, but decides to risk getting in front of both of them. You swerve to the outside to miss her, then back toward the highway so that you don't hit something on the side of the road, and the car pulls a move straight out of the Dukes of Hazzard and spins around, leaving you with the front passenger corner of the car in the other lane.

There's that time stretch again--it happened instantaneously, from what I remember of other people's descriptions, but it seemed to me like we just sat there for a moment, had time to catch our breath, had time to plan to pull off the road before we turned around and went on our way, but...

*SLAM*

The trailer of the second semi hit the front passenger side wheel well, ripped the front end off the car, and sent the bulk of the car's remaining body backwards.

I knew that it was already close to dusk when it happened, but when we tumbled out of the car, it seemed like it was bright as midday to me. My memory of that evening isn't what it used to be, but I do remember that, I remember how *bright* it all seemed, how clearly I could see everything, how the accident itself seemed to happen in slow motion. I really did think we had time to take that breath, time to pull off the road, but there's no way that could've happened.

When the tow truck came to get the car, that's finally when it all got dark--and to me, it got very dark, very quickly, like someone had just flipped a switch and turned off the sun. There was light a moment ago, now there's nothing...nothing but the flares set on the road, the lights of the traffic slowly starting to pass...the distant shine of the stars overhead.

We all should have died that day. I still don't know why we didn't. But we walked away, with a mild headache for me and a couple of random scratches elsewhere for others. Even the eggs in the cooler in the trunk were all intact.

Both of those events are hazy for me now, the semi accident especially, though you never really escape from it. I'll hear that sound of the semi hitting the car forever, I think.

It's interesting to me, though, that shift in perception, the way that time stretches...it's almost as if the mind knows right away that Something Bad Is Going To Happen and it takes steps to protect you from it.

The human mind is an amazing thing.