ON THIS DAY A YEAR AGO... WE NEARLY DIED

On this day last year, Sanja and I nearly died. We've recounted the story of the accident in at least one YouTube video, so you don't need me to repeat it again here. I guess I just want to write about it, and reflect on what it meant... and how it still affects us, a year later.

I've still got a meaty scar on my hand, that will always be there. Some days it hurts, it's still numb in places, but it is improving slowly. Sanja still gets pain in her shoulder, where she broke her collarbone. And - as we discovered recently - she's got a hernia, most likely from the accident, which she's currently waiting on an operation for.

I'd love to be able to write about how the accident, y'know, made us appreciate how fleeting life can be, and how it can be taken away from you in a moment, and all those sort of cliches... but the truth is, I'm not sure I learned any life lessons from what happened. In terms of life changing events, Covid has been far bigger, because that's shown me the benefit of not working as hard as I had been.

Mainly, the accident was just a shit thing that happened - that robbed us of a honeymoon - and has left us both with (admittedly relatively mild) psychological scars. We were having the BEST day ever, and it just got interrupted in the most violent way possible.

It's weird... when I got whacked in the face by a random loon a few years back, there was no real fallout psychologically, because I hadn't seen him coming. With the accident, I saw the truck barreling towards us, and it's that - and the subsequent impact - that I still get flashbacks to. Sanja's main thing is remembering how she couldn't breath in the car, after the windscreen smashed, and it filled with dust. Feeling she was going to suffocate. If we think about any of it too hard, there are tears usually.

I still tense up at junctions. I still don't own a car, and drive only occasionally when I borrow my dad's one. We both find driving scary now, and the really scary thing is how a moment's distraction - either my own or another driver's - can change so much. I still feel guilt over it, as if I could've somehow done something different. As the driver, I can't quite shake feeling it was my fault that Sanja got hurt, even though on a rational level I know it was just a thing that happened. That really, nobody is to blame. There's no real guilty party; it was a dusty backroad in the literal middle of nowhere, and neither car expected to see another.

All that has been the main fallout of the accident. It wasn't, however much I'd like to spin it as such, a positive thing that happened.

That's not to say there weren't positives. In the same way I was blown away by the kindness of strangers after I got attacked, the same applies to the accident; the kindness of the other driver and his shaken apology, the paramedics, the police... the first responders, as they call them over there. As awful as the world seems to have become, I've still got faith in the empathy and goodness of other people. But I've always been that way. That's nothing new, really.

And we do still laugh at our attempt to visit a Wholefoods a couple of nights later, and shuffling around like we'd crapped our pants. And the morning we checked out of a hotel, and I had to kick the suitcases through the lobby.

So, yeah... we nearly died, and it taught us nothing. There was no silver lining, no lesson. I'm just glad we're both still here.

Well, alright. There was one silver lining. We got a private tour of Galaxy's Edge, which, at least from my point of view, almost made it all worthwhile... But it would've been preferable to have had that without the whole near-death thing.

Paul