text: Time is a strange thing. You don’t really notice it, you are not aware of its flow in the background. It goes on, uninterrupted, at its own pace. You measure your life in events that you experience, chunks that glue together in your mind as memories, but not really on a timeline. You wake up in the morning, drink your coffee, smoke a cigarette, drive to work, do your 8 hour chore and then drive back home, maybe have a beer or two and go to bed. Repeat. And then it’s Tuesday afternoon, in December. It’s been a long day, full with annoying people doing stupid shit and saying even more stupid shit. You are driving back, one more dot among the thousands driving in the same direction on the highway. It’s dark, and raining heavily. It’s not even rain, it’s that disgusting combination of rain and snow, that just makes you even more depressed. You are not really paying attention, you’ve driven this route so many times, it is reflex by now. Out of the corner of your eye, you notice something. The truck in the right lane suddenly moves left. It’s a glitch in the monotony of the flow of cars, unexpected by your reflex of driving. So you notice it. Your brain focuses in an instant. And this is when time does its strange thing. It brakes pace. It slows to a crawl. Tick. Everything is now in slow-motion. The wipers are almost standing still, and you can see the rain drops as they slowly shoot towards the window. It is almost mesmerizing. The truck is very slowly veering to the left. It probably tries to avoid a car in front of it. You wonder what could have happened to freak the driver out so? There is a car in the lane to your right. A mini-van. One of those cars you immediately think of belonging to a family, with too many children. You always wondered if you would ever have to buy such a car. They are so ugly. It hasn’t noticed the truck swerving yet. You already realize that there is a high chance it will get hit. The car next to you starts swerving too. Very slowly, it starts moving left, into your lane. It must have finally noticed the truck pulling close, and got scared. Tick. By this time, your body is already starting to tense up, knowing something dramatic is about to happen. ‘Amazing how fast the unconscious works’, you think to yourself. You take notice of your speed. It is more than it should be, given the weather conditions. You know this, but you give yourself the excuse that everyone else is doing it too. Bad excuse, you realize. The mini-van next to you has pulled too hard to the left. With the road surface as slippery as it is, it loses grip to the back wheels and starts slowly drifting. It will end up in your lane. Through the side window, you see the face of the other driver. His expression is a mix of fear, panic and concentration. He obviously lost control of the car, and he knows it. But he is still fighting. You wonder what must be going through his head right now? Is he thinking about his wife? His kids? His own life? Maybe nothing at all? You will hit the mini-van. You are driving too fast, and it is too close. All the calculations your brain made, considering all the variables in front of you, gave the same result. It is unavoidable. Tick. The mini-van is now right in front of you. It is perpendicular to you, in the middle of the lane. Your car is closing in on it, very slowly. Centimeters away now. Unavoidable. You look at the other driver, just as he shifts his eyes at you. He catches your gaze and looks straight at you. Eye contact. You can see the fear in his eyes. He is afraid of dying, of losing everything. He is afraid for his family. You just now realize what is happening. Until now it has been a slow motion movie, you just seem to look at. Never really sinked in that you are one of the actors. It is happening to you. The realization is overwhelming. Is this really it? This morning, when you woke up, shuffled to the kitchen and turned on the coffee machine, you didn’t think that it would be your last morning. Would you have done things differently , had you known? Would you have been nicer to that colleague you can’t stand? Would you have asked out that one person you were dreaming of ever since you met them? Doesn’t matter anymore, does it? As your car touches the mini-van, you cramp up. Your hands are squeezing the wheel. Your muscles tense up. You start feeling the force of the impact, slowly moving in a big wave through the car. You lurch forward, the seatbelt starting to cut into your skin. The panels creak and pop, plastic starts to break into small pieces, at the weak points. The windshield shatters in a spiderweb, small shards flying outward. Your head swings forward, unable to hold back the inertia. As it moves towards the wheel, you see the small panel in front of the airbag crack open. You are too close to the wheel, you think. This will hurt. It is unavoidable. Tick.