2022:
On the tenth of March, 2022, I was nearly killed in a traffic accident.
I was driving down the highway. It was a stretch that wound along the side of a hill, with a steep slope up on the left and an equally sharp drop on the right, both sides heavily forested with pine trees. The sky was covered in clouds so low and thick that it was nearly dark although by the clock it was only mid-afternoon. It had been raining heavily and was still drizzling, with water draining off the slope to the left washing across the road.
It was a Thursday and, I had had a tough week. I'd been organising a conference on behalf of my employer in another city. The conference had finished the previous night. I had spent the morning settling final bills and taking care of all the rest of the minutiae that accompanies this kind of undertaking, as anyone else who's ever done it must know.
In any case, it was late morning when I finally managed to get in my car and set off home, through torrential rain. One stop for petrol and another for lunch later, I was driving down the mountain road, rotating my shoulders and neck to reduce the stress-ache that had gripped them. The traffic was light, and I began to hope I would be home in time for supper.
All of a sudden, I felt a tremendous blow from behind, which flung me off my seat and into my seatbelt, and my car twisted sharply to the right. All I remember seeing is the road vanish from in front of me, reappear to my left, and then disappear altogether as my car swung even further round, tree branches whipping against my windscreen as I went off the road and down the steep slope.
I didn't have the slightest idea what had happened. I didn't even have time to be scared. I just remember a very calm voice in the back of my mind, saying "That's it; these are the last seconds of your life. You're going to die now."
I haven't any recollection of the actual crash or much of what happened afterwards. I do remember hanging in my seat, the seatbelt digging into my chest, my face pressed against the air bag. I could see nothing, I could hardly breathe, and I couldn't move or even feel my legs. I don't recall pain except in my right upper forehead. There was something very wrong with my right shoulder, but I couldn't tell what. The only thing I remember apart from that is a voice somewhere close by, saying, in a shocked tone, "She's still alive. There's so much blood...but I think she's still alive." I remember that voice very well.
Later I was told that I was conscious and lucid enough to repeatedly ask, while I was being removed from the smashed wreckage and then in the ambulance, whether I still had my legs. But not only do I have no memory of that, I don't recall being taken out of the car or the ambulance at all.
The next real memory I have is of waking up in a hospital bed. My forehead was gashed to the bone, my right shoulder had been dislocated, and both my lower legs had compound fractures. My spine had been twisted badly enough to have torn a couple of discs. I had also broken bones in both feet and had a long slash up my left forearm that had only just avoided laying open a major blood vessel.
What had happened? An overloaded lorry, driving down the wet decline, had lost control and swung round the bend far too quickly. It had rammed my car from behind and sent it spinning off the road.
The driver was arrested, but I don't know what happened to him afterwards. At this point it doesn't matter anyway.
The only reason I was alive, I discovered, was my much mocked slow driving. Even with an open road before me I average fifty kilometres per hour and never exceed seventy. If I'd been going much faster I'd have been catapulted all the way downhill and they'd have had to scrape me up with a spoon.
So, I was told, I was "lucky", only I did not feel lucky. I had rods in the bones of both my lower legs, stitches in my forehead and left forearm, and my right shoulder was in a pressure bandage. I was in a haze comprising equal parts painkillers and pain. I was in a hospital bed, subject to the indignities of bedpans and sponge baths, and at that time I was far from convinced that I would ever walk again.
I especially hated the bedpan, and kept apologising to the nurses for having to use it. They were quite cheerful about it, really, and kept telling me -- something I was already heartily sick of -- that I was so lucky to have survived. About the only exception was a tall and sultry looking young woman whom I'll call Amanda, who was a trauma nurse and, I discovered, had been one of the team working on me when I'd been brought in, and who'd volunteered for extra duty to take care of me. She never tried to be artificially cheery with me.
Though we never talked about it, I was convinced Amanda had some kind of empathy for my situation. When she sponge-bathed me, her hands would gently linger on my stitches and she always smoothed back my hair and tell me what she could see about the rate of healing from her experience. I wondered if she'd ever been in a bad accident herself, but wanting to talk about pain and bloodshed was the last thing I wanted to do.
Eventually I was released from hospital. My employer's insurance paid the bills. Still in pain, with both lower legs and feet encased in blue acrylic casts, I was taken home. My mother had turned up to feed the goldfish and "take care of me", and those who have read the previous episodes in my chronicles can tell how that went. She all but accused me of trying to get myself killed in exactly the same fashion my father had done, just to hurt her. Once the casts were off and I -- albeit with the aid of two crutches -- was able to make my way around the flat, I told her that she no longer needed to keep her life on hold on my behalf.
My life, however, was well and truly on hold. I had changed jobs in mid 2021, and my new employer had allowed me to work from home, so I was not unemployed and didn't have to live on my savings. That's a joke, by the way, that word "savings"; I have none. However, the first time I was recovered enough to go out in the street, I was hit by a panic attack. I crumpled down in a shop doorway, literally struggling to breathe.
"Do you need help, love?" an elderly woman asked. I looked up at her, and I don't know what I answered, but she helped me up along with her daughter and offered me a lift home. And then I discovered that I could not make myself get into her car. I absolutely couldn't do it.
That night I had the first of the nightmares. I don't recall the exact details, but it was of a pattern that has grown horribly familiar to me over the last few years. I am at the wheel of my car. Sometimes I'm lost, driving aimlessly along a dark road under a dark sky, conscious that something is behind me and gaining on me, but I can't see what it is. Other times I'm driving down a nearly vertical slope, wrestling the steering wheel, knowing that whatever I do I can't turn aside from whatever awaits me at the bottom. Sometimes it's boulders, sometimes a deep pit, sometimes an expanse of water, or sometimes nothing at all. And on yet other occasions there's something in the car with me, something I can't see but which is out to kill me.
I came awake in a way that, too, has become familiar; curled into a foetal position, my arms wrapped as tightly around myself as possible, my fingernails digging into the flesh of my breasts hard enough to draw blood. It was two in the morning. I couldn't get to sleep again.
Since then these dreams have become so frequent that I cut my fingernails to the quick and taken to sleeping in T shirts thick enough to protect my skin from my nails. The anti-anxiety medications I've been given haven't helped much. Sometimes they keep me sleeping when I would normally escape from the dream by coming awake.
My car was almost new, and the insurance payment was enough for me to be able to afford to replace it, but I simply could not. Even the thought of sitting in a car again made my heart race and my lips grow numb.
Virtually self-confined to my flat, I lost every shred of confidence in myself. I felt utterly unattractive, without the slightest shred of self-worth. The only thing that kept me going at times was the memories of the past, the love affairs I'd had. At other times those same memories would be a cruel reminder of what I had no longer. And of course my libido had ceased to exist. When I tried to masturbate, I couldn't even rouse a flicker of self-arousal. I couldn't even get wet, forget an orgasm.
No, 2022 was not the best year I have ever had.
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2023:
One day -- something over a year after the accident -- my doorbell rang. It was a Saturday so I was off work, sitting on the sofa trying to immerse myself in a rereading of the second volume of the unexpurgated edition of "The One Thousand Nights And One Night." Since I hadn't ordered any deliveries, and I was in no mood (or for that matter clad) for visitors, I was tempted to ignore it until whoever it was went away. But then I heard an extremely familiar voice calling my name.
"Juliana, I know you're in there. Open the door or I'll call a locksmith to open it."
My head whipped round, my mouth opening in surprise. "Coming", I called, and -- dragging on a pair of shorts over my naked lower body -- I went to the door (I was still wearing the T shirt I'd slept in because why not?). "Oh my Cthulhu. It's you."
"Were you perhaps expecting someone else?" I hadn't met Mila in four or five years, but she hadn't changed at all. She's one of those women who in their mid forties still somehow manage to look as though they're twenty, and without the aid of plastic surgery or tons of professionally applied makeup. "May I come in?"
I realised I was standing blocking the door and goggling up at her like an imbecile. "Come in, of course. What made you turn up here so suddenly?"
She perched on the sofa and picked up the book. "Ah, Shahrazad," she said. "Probably the greatest character in fiction. I often wish I could have met her."
"Mila..."
"Yes, well..." She looked me up and down, from my unkempt hair to my nail-polish-less toenails. "I've been going out of my mind with worry about you. After your accident..."
"You know about that?"
She frowned. "Of course I know about that. Do you imagine I live under a stone? Why didn't you call me?"
I didn't know. "I don't know," I said. "I'm just not important enough to bother anybody."
"Don't be ridiculous. I'm here, aren't I?" She looked me over again. "Juliana, what's wrong?"
