I was twenty two when I lost my left eye to a piece of safety glass and most of my memory to the intersection of Kendall and Hibiscus. It wasn’t exactly a learning experience, in my case the euphemism that hindsight is 20/20 doesn’t really apply.

Me and John had both been drinking, and we’d had a good time. He offered me a ride home. Tiffany tried to take his keys and he wouldn’t let her. I think I tried to talk him out of it myself but he wouldn’t listen.

He had a Honda Civic, silver, that he’d gotten used from Craig’s List a couple of years ago. It had been in a bad fender bender. Its sleek front end was a crumpled, rusted ruin on the left side, and from a certain angle the car looked like it was snarling, though it ran just fine. Every now and then he had to replace the bulb of the left headlight, when it rained really hard the water got in and shorted it out, but the engine never quit until it became a mangled ruin on March 5.

I still remember how it smelled inside. Clean, the carpet fresh and vacuumed crumbless, the leather wiped down with one of those organic all purpose concoctions you can buy from Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. An air freshener shaped like an orange swung like Poe’s pendulum from the rearview mirror, a ripe and round shadow in the sallow lights of the bar’s parking lot. Say what you want about John but he cared about his car, screwed up as it was. He was the kind of guy who would wash it by hand on weekends even if he’d worked overtime overtime.

We got in and I didn’t think about the seatbelt. I was so wasted I was having trouble staying awake. I’d won at beer pong though and I was pretty proud of myself.

“Let’s get you home bro,” John said. “Mind if I crash on your couch?”

I shook my head and immediately regretted it. I think I said something to the effect of my house was his, in slurred Spanish. Casa and collision don’t rhyme though, do they?

The Honda chimed pleasantly as he turned the key and then he put the car in reverse.

The rest is your typical magic carpet ride, the blur of a sleeping city and sleepless streetlights, the darkness of the last night I was actually the me I was born to be glossy through the shiny glass of rolled up windows and the pseudo vertigo of fourteen Heinekens.

While I still had two eyes I caught the clock on the dash. It was 2:16.

According to the police reports we had about seven minutes around then.


Serious car accidents aren’t really like what you see in the movies. There’s no dramatic music, no crunch of broken glass. Usually, as in my case, there’s no heart stopping moment of realization either. Usually you don’t see it coming, whether you’re drunk or sober as the steel and rubber and asphalt you’re about to meet. Life, some singer once sung, has a way of sneaking up on you in a not so funny way.

For me it was a little like falling asleep on a plane just before it lands, and being woken up by a crash and a roar as the tires hit the tarmac, the rumble and the scream as the jet’s engines switch to full reverse and the world shakes and shivers. You don’t really know what’s happening for a few seconds, before reality rushes in and you remember where and what you are again.

When John t-boned a red Prius around 2:23 on a Saturday night it was a lot like that. I had been staring out the passenger side window and we were doing about 40. My hands were in my lap and Linkin Park was playing on the radio.

Maybe being drunk is what saved my life, maybe it was the fact that I had no idea that what was about to happen was about to happen and so I didn’t tense up, or maybe if you’re a more religious or spiritual minded sort you could call it fate or guardian angels…perhaps, just perhaps, it was just plain old luck.

I flew through the windshield of John’s Civic, with such force that I cleared the roof of the Prius and wound up in the intersection along with a shower of sparkling glass and twisted metal. I felt a hotness in one of my eyes, and I couldn’t see out of it anymore. It was almost pleasant, that warmth. In fact I was warm all over.

I heard screaming too. It seemed to come from very far away.

There wasn’t any pain, not then. Somehow I got up, and then I was running. Something deep down told me to even though it doesn’t make any sense in logical retrospect.

I didn’t make it far.