30 days and change: Day 20
DAY TWENTY: Have you experienced a life-or-death situation? How did you feel?
Word Count: 399
Why yes, yes I have. There is more than one, but the one that comes to mind is flipping my best friend's Ford Explorer upside down in a ditch on a school night. This accident builds a trauma bond, blood oath, secret alliances, and strong friendships. Lol. It’s why he and I knew we’d be friends forever. (or maybe I should have run then) Oddly enough, we’d only been friends for maybe two weeks, and that was maybe our 3rd time hanging out. After leaving a night of bowling with our two other friends, we decided to split up in the two cars. I jumped in the car with Cody, and the girls rode together back to Hailey’s for the night. Leaving the bowling alley, music at 100, laughs and conversations flowing, we head down the dark roads of Winnabow. Winnabow, NC, is an unincorporated stretch of country land between my hometown and Wilmington, NC. As you can imagine, with an area named Winnabow, there isn’t much there, and that’s street lights included.
As we wind down the dark roads, with the street lights appearing less frequently, the song ‘Day & Night’ by Kid Cudi plays, and the dancing ensues! As we are having teenage fun, the car begins to drift off to the left, and panic behind the wheel grows, causing him to overcorrect; the car slides across the cement, and the yellow stripes painted to the ground shine yellow above our heads. With eyes closed and screams expelled, we landed upside down in a ditch, with the greenest grass covering the windshield that was shattered into tiny pieces resembling a delicate spider web etched in ice. In what felt like 40 minutes of silence, we looked at each other in disbelief and began to check our extremities. Realizing we had no broken bones, bruises, or severe cuts, I knew we were upside down, and the car was still running. We rush out of the car, crawling through the passenger side window, only to find an old white man with a gun and flashlight approaching us. After realizing we weren’t a threat, he helped us call 911. Looking back at the car, there would be no logical reason we would have made it out other than some otherworldly support. I felt like that whole experience taught me that you literally could be here today, gone tomorrow. That was my second near-death experience, and luckily, my best friend and I still are alive to tell the story.
