I hit a raccoon with the car I was driving.
There is no real excuse. It happened in one of the easiest parts of the drive. I felt mostly aware. Just past an underpass. I swerved and braked pretty early but it was very dark (3:30 AM) so even going the limit I was overdriving the high beams, and you did not escape. How do I drive away from that? Do I drive faster to spend less time on the road? Or drive much slower, stay “safe” but end up with an exhausted drive that takes all night, overlapping into those early hours where you are known to find your rhythm? The constant dilemma of hyperlocal maxima against a backdrop of more broadly considerate ways to live my life.
And of course I didn’t react fast enough, or in the right way. Maybe hard braking would've been a better idea than swerving a bit to try to avoid you. We can’t exactly co-ordinate our efforts, me braking and swerving to the right, you running to the right, propelled by a final burst of adrenaline that I can only hope reduced the pain of impact. That’s not true, there are a lot of things I could have done that would have constituted co-ordination. Not driving so late. Not driving at all. If it was me, I imagine I would have kept running, it seems like the logical thing to do.
In the rain after that moment I could feel my mind straining to rationalize what had happened, to absolve myself of some responsibility, to heighten the concern of environment, and yes circumstance, in order to declare myself, at least on some level, not guilty. There should be no such relief, and yet I can feel a part of me desperately grasping for it, a part I will diminish in this sentence to a fraction but which in reality like constitutes most of the whole. I feel the need to write some words, words that would have meant nothing to you. Somehow that’s supposed to make me feel better. Perhaps the most disappointing part is that it does. It is a relief to have thought about. And I worry, I worry that I know that this relief leaves space for all of this to happen again, and yet I did it anyways, I am doing it anyways. I am disappointed in myself.
I am done with driving i think. The train works well for me, I want to stick to that as much as I can. The amount of roadkill I saw driving back and forth on the 403 (which I really started noticing after W rescued an orphaned raccoon) was one of the factors in wanting to get rid of my car… I’m obviously not the best driver, and night driving is particularly problematic… but it also feels like a systemic issue with cars. Maybe it’s just that I am particularly unsuited to driving, but more and more I think the expectations people have for mobility with cars (including myself) are just beyond what I think is an acceptable balance between convenience and destruction (planetary, animal, human, and otherwise).
Our eyes seem most useful for looking up at the stars. My eyes, at least, are not meant to guide a deadly hunk of metal one hundred kilometres per hour through the night.
an invitation to dinner
(fear of death)
conversation, food, friends,
critical exchange
an alphabet of miscellany
an extended stay
(fear of death)
the serrated knife
between homesickness
and offhand routine
a new beginning
(fear of death)
littered with possibility
redundant against
an inevitable outcome
a late night journey
(fear of death)
a vague awareness
driving faster than light
towards a certain home
the end of a life
(fear of death)
false equivalence
never fast enough
to escape metal & dust