Bump! The Third Installment

Apparently, what you see is not always what you get.  That's the mantra I'm repeating to myself as I try to come to terms with these words from the body shop guy: If you'd been rear-ended again, you'd have been in big trouble.  You really shouldn't be driving your car like this.

It's been a busy week since the damage was done;  I finally found time to visit the body shop this afternoon.  They are lovely, snarky, funny folks, so his serious tone required serious attention.  we went out to The Uv, he lifted the carpeting in the trunk, and I gasped.

The floor pan is bend.  Smushed.  Crumpled.  Crushed.  There's really nothing left of the car's structural integrity.  A tiny bump would have done me in.

A quick call to the other driver's insurance company secured me a bright red Hyundai Elantra from Enterprise, which did, indeed, pick me up and got me on my way with a minimum of fuss and bother.  I drove back to the body shop, unloaded my stuff, got groceries for dinner and came home, mildly peeved because I left the garage door opener in The Uv.  

There's nothing awful about any of it.  I see that as my fingers type the words.  But I was grumpy and grumbly and was unfit company for anyone.  I soaked in the pool and I swam a lap or two, and I walked a few, and I bent and pressed and pulsed and floated and gradually the yucks soaked away.  

Most of them, anyway.  The space where I placed the memory of the bump! the sound the adrenaline the loss of control, gone in a second but always ready for a comeback performance..... PTSD, the gift that keeps on giving.  It's only a fender, albeit a $6000 fender. I avoided the dire consequences.  It's a beautiful, hot, breezy, sunny Tucson afternoon and the trees are showing off their newly pruned selves in yellow abundance.  

I don't need to be sad; it accomplishes nothing.  I notice these emotions as intruders into my world more readily than I have before, and that's major progress.  I have all sorts of strategies to move beyond the threat and into safety, and they work very well, thank you for asking. I just wish I didn't have to use them at all.  

Really, I just wish that none of it had ever happened.