The end of an era

Today a woman fell asleep at the wheel of her car and drove through a red light, slamming into my car as I was driving across the intersection. I saw her silver SUV out of my window a half second before she hit, and I knew with absolute clarity what was about to happen. She hit me on the passenger side of my car near the back, which is probably the best place to get hit by a car, not that getting hit by a car is ever something you desire to have happen. The force of the impact crumpled the rear quarter of my car and spun me around so that I was pointing exactly towards where I had come from.

I walked away with no injuries. I'm so incredibly sad to lose the car. I visited the wrecking yard today to clear out the rest of my belongings. There wasn't much there, a few photographs in the glove box, an ice scraper, and a beach umbrella in the back.

This was my first car. And the beach umbrella was once shared with someone important. And I also remember using the ice scraper on a frigid February afternoon to extract my car from the frozen slush of a college parking lot. And the photograph is creased in the middle, but I look happy in it and I can still feel her in my arms when I wake up in the middle of the night. And she was the first person I wanted to call when I opened my door and stepped onto the smoking, rubber-stenched pavement and I couldn't hear anything.

Here are two photographs I took for the insurance denizens: