Here is what happened

I was 19 years old. It was late and cold and I was driving home on a dark mountain road. There was frost melting on my windshield. My breath hung in clouds in the air. My little Volkswagen sputtered along, picking up speed on the decline, heading toward the tight s-curve. Peter Murphy played on the tape deck. Indigo Eyes. 

The other car came around the blind corner on my side of the road, heading straight toward me, coming fast. The driver was drunk. I didn't know that yet. But she was drunk and she was coming fast and there was nowhere to turn.

I didn't have time to hit the brakes. 

My car

***

I first wrote about my car accident last summer (and some other stuff too), and the emotional and physical scars it left behind. My friend Travis left a comment on Facebook about my post that set a chain of events into motion that I'm going to try to describe to you in this blog.

What Travis said was this: "Wow, Kate. I didn't know about this amazing story. I never even noticed the Harry Potter scar. Thank you for sharing this with the world. That took a lot of courage in itself. Kate, The Girl Who Lived."

And I read his words, The Girl Who Lived, and my very first thought was, "Well, sort of."

Um. Sort of? That was the way I thought of the last 20 years of my life?

Your sort-of life, my brain corrected. It's only ever been sort-of, hasn't it?