While coming back from Thanksgiving break something quite out of the ordinary happened. Let me start at the beginning.
If you don’t know, I live in San Antonio. Usually to get to and from TCU I take a five hour bus ride that is thoroughly unenjoyable. Because of this, I was extremely excited when my friend offered to drive me to TCU. Turns out, she was getting a puppy right around Austin, so she would be in the area. Not only was I happy to know that I wouldn’t have to take the horrid bus, I was also ecstatic to hear that I would be sharing the ride back with a cute corgi puppy named Amber. When Saturday rolled around, I couldn’t wait to get to Austin to meet this new friend. Three of my friends were there to greet me and we got in the car to make our way to Fort Worth.
We couldn’t decide on where to eat. My friends all suggested Chipotle, however I very much dislike Chipotle (I know, I know) so I vocalized against it. Because of that, we decided we would get food further into our trip. We were on the highway laughing and singing along to Taylor Swift. We had our cute little puppy in between me and my friend in the backseat. She was just sitting there on her own when my friend in the passenger seat asked to hold her. No more than five minutes later, it happened.
We crashed. Not only did we crash, but we crashed our friend’s mom’s car. The airbags deployed as my friend did not hesitate a bit to call the police. We all got out of the car shaking. Luckily, we hit a couple who was very nice and tried to sympathize with us. We tried to remain calm, but we all knew that we were shaken up by what just happened. It all seemed to happen in a matter of seconds. Traffic stopped suddenly and my friend was not able to break fast enough. It helped us to hear that the driver that we hit had to literally stand on his breaks so he wouldn’t crash the car ahead of him. We all kept saying that we were lucky that no one got hurt, but we were still freaking out over what had just happened.
After the police came, we tried to drive our car. We couldn’t get more than a few feet before the engine became over-heated. We decided to call our friend’s mom to come pick us up-she was three hours away. In those three hours we sat in our sad crashed car with this two month old puppy. We had gotten various people come up to our car and ask if we were okay. One couple even gave us their phone number and told us that they would be more than willing to even just wait with us till our ride got there.
Through that three hour wait, we had a lot to talk about. In depth conversations about our pasts and dreams for the future were only a small margin of the subjects that we discussed that day. Now that some time has passed since the accident, we cannot help but think of things that could have stopped that experience. We’ve thought about what would have happened if my friend didn’t ask for the puppy five minutes before the crash; if the puppy would have been okay. We discussed what would have happened if my friend was driving in the middle lane instead of the left. Through it all we learned that we cannot just keep over analyzing what happened that day. Some horrible things occurred, but so many other things were pure luck. We were lucky that none of us were hurt, that our friend’s mom could have picked us up, and that our new puppy was okay. We were lucky for those that stopped and asked if we were okay. The domino effect of the actions you take are so easy to get wrapped up in, but wishing you could have done something different does not change what has already happened. I guess the real lesson to take from the event is this: Learn to like Chipotle, it could save you from a car crash.
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