No one ever talks about it. They don’t talk about the feeling after it happens when all you smell is burned rubber as your friends scream at you to, “get the fuck out!” They don’t tell you about the shakiness that makes you feel like you’ll never walk again or the immediate cry that comes out as a guy you had just met weeks prior hugs you as tightly as lifelong friends, stabilizing your shaken, panicked body; not letting go for what feels like forever. They don’t talk about running back into the car to search for your phone so you can make the call to your widowed mother because the car she had gifted you just three months ago had been totaled. They don’t tell you about the feeling when all of the drunk college students walk by to stop to make sure you’re alright, mere strangers that you will never see again. They don’t talk about the unexpected comfort as the bar owner wraps you and your best friend in a blanket, sheltering you from the trauma
you’d just endured together.
They don’t tell you about the guilt you’ll be smothered by. You’d known these people for three months–originally randomly assigned as transfer roommates and neighbors. They could’ve died at your hand even though people say it’s not your fault as the other driver was the drunk one. You did the “right thing” and stayed sober, but they don’t talk about the feeling of knowing you could have killed these people–your newest, closest friends and that you could have died alongside them. They don’t tell you about the loneliness of being 14 hours away from your mother and not understanding what the police are saying. They don’t talk about what it’s like to face something grave completely alone, without her for the very first time.
They don’t tell you about the months that follow the accident as nothing prepares you for the physical effects or the mental repercussions. How you struggle to sleep because it replays over in your head. How you finally drift off, only to be awoken by nightmares that smell of burning rubber. They don’t talk about how you’ll replay it in your head for it to make sense why you all survived–how somehow, no one was seriously injured. They don’t tell you how your loved ones suffer too. How your mother now has both a traumatized child and droves of legal work to manage. How your four older siblings were petrified at the thought of losing their baby sister merely five years after their father.
How your baby cousins question why you can no longer hold them due to injuries they can’t–shouldn’t–understand. They don’t talk about how many times you’ll question yourself for that night. If only you didn’t want to stop for a waffle, you would’ve taken a completely different route home, far from where it happened. They don’t tell you how many ways you’ll blame yourself because you were trusted to be in control.
They let you forget that you were just an 18-year-old girl, the sober one, trying to make memories with your friends in college. You had no idea that those memories laced with music and laughter would be tainted with screams and smoke. They don’t talk about it because you’re still so young. They don’t tell you about it because that should never have happened to you. They don’t tell you how normalized drinking and driving is, yet the intoxicated person is rarely the only person who suffers. They don’t talk about it because then they’d have to admit there is a problem. They don’t tell you about it because then things
would have to change.
