Sometimes in life, you get into completely unnecessary accidents on your way to see someone who has affected you profoundly enough to warrant frequent mention in your ridiculous (albeit refreshingly lucid) tumblelog.
They jerk you around via phone indecisively all night after initially blowing you off because they had a bad day. Finally, upon their request, you leave your house to go visit them.
In your next moment of sentient consciousness you are in a hospital bed with three missing teeth, aware of nothing except that you were on your way to see them and you never made it. As immediately as you’ve realized this, you weep uncontrollably.
When you get home from the hospital, you call around for paramedic information about what happened to you. You find out that not only did you in fact make it to where you were going, you made it three blocks past where you were going and THAT was where you were hit by a car.
God knows how drunk and confused I must’ve been to have ended up there.
This whole damn mess was like a literary tragedy. Everything about the sequence of events that transpired that night was completely unnecessary and incredibly ironic.
Such disasters might start out like this: the person may have initiated plans with you which fell through at the last minute due to circumstances outside of anyone’s control. (On your graduation night. After you canceled plans with your parents for the night. After they’d taken time off work to come into town and book a hotel room to celebrate.) And they may have promised to make it up to you, even though you assured them it wasn’t necessary. But eager as always to prove to themselves they aren’t an inconsiderate friend, they’ve insisted.
When you’re supposed to meet them again, you may be drinking at a bar while you wait for them to decide when they’re ready to humor you out of their own reluctant guilt. Eventually they will tell you they don’t feel like going to a bar and have just decided to go home, and then you will start drinking destructively. You may spend the night crying and drinking destructively at the bar, and you will even be too overwhelmed to feel embarrassment over crying in public. Or shame at your general predicament.
You eventually leave the bar and make it home completely intact.
That’s when they let you know they’d still like to see you.
You are outraged by this proposition because it’s past midnight, you’re weeping without constraint (now that you’re back in your own home), and you’re about to go to sleep. But as it turns out, you have just enough self-respect to say no to them twice but not three times. The third time you consider saying “maybe another day” but you leave it up to the weather forecast to determine your decision.
It turns out the weather will be solid crap for the projected next five days, so you decide not to reschedule. You curse the weather, and reluctantly leave your house again to see them.
The sad thing is I probably would have made it to his house from the bar just fine.
