The Benjamin Report

It’s been an eventful year. It started just like any other. I had the same job I’ve had for nearly a decade. I’d been living in the same home I’ve lived in for five years. I was reading, I was not. I was paying my loans, my rent, my insurance. All with the money from my wallet with the holes in it. Months later, I had a different wallet. I had since been fired and working at a library, then another bigger library to go along with the other one. I had a new apartment then, and another car too. To hopefully last me while I settle in to this right, finally right, path of living.

It was all on the upshot. That was before the crash.

I was listening to a podcast for entertainment. Comfortable in my climate- controlled haven of transport while moseying north to visit my family for Christmas. All my gifts and luggage in the back seat. It was snowing, a torrent with low visibility and unsure roads. Although for the most part traffic was clinging onto each other, I did scratch away for a moment and decided to switch lanes.

3 seconds before the turn, not even 0.5 or 0.3 or 0.000000032 seconds before the swerve of tires over ice losing the pavement did I think anything would change. Even after, as the crash had occurred and the only true disruption I felt was my phone alarming 911 and the subtly intrusive smells of machinery, raw industry, and crumpled metal and plastic.

Stepping out of the vehicle and looking at the mish mash wasn’t enough.

The arrival of firemen and the filling out of forms wasn’t enough. Signing away the car to insurance.

Taking out all valuables, gifts and all.

Unscrewing the license plate.

Waving goodbye and confusedly tapping away at my insurance’s website to submit a claim and warming up on a couch watching Hallmark Christmas movies with my Aunt and Uncle.

Waiting for my dad to pick me up while he misses the Packers obliterating one of his most hated teams.

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There is no feeling like a waste of time anymore. Everything felt so routine.

Everyone telling me it’s a thing that happens, that I’m lucky to be alive, lucky to not be injured, not to stew too much because I’ll be alright and back on track soon. Soon enough. Soon at the least.

Lucky to be alive?

After the crash, immediately, I could look around and see not a difference in the way of things. The podcast was still playing, the hosts were even laughing over one of Peter’s typical lame jokes. There was not a scratch inside, all luggage and gifts were still in place where I had set them.

It’s as if I was just living as I had always been. Like most people and things that breathe, all routine. Lucky to be alive. Lucky to not be injured during one small crack in my timeline not too out of the norm.

I could move on. I could write it off a week from now or a month from now as a blip in my past, maybe twist it up into a funny story or a simple joke. I could do as most people do. I could just go. Could just move forward.

But after the crash there were sparse moments where I was alone looking out across the highway, still busied with cars and trucks trying to get somewhere for the holidays, and could see just beyond into a gutter of woods and piled snow.

I couldn’t really feel the cold, at least to the degree it would crack through my confused head. There was no before or after the crash. Just as there is no before or after any other moment. Because there is no track to follow, or plan to be held to, even ever-changing as most plans are.

Not long ago, I wanted to be this, then that, but always that. I wanted there to be where I lived in this amount of time. And it HAD to be that amount of time because no one else can do it in that amount of time, though I KNEW I could be different. Because I had to be different than them, they were always doing that. And sure, I did want to do that, but I wanted to do that in a different way, a more “me” way, ya know?

I always saw myself as that kind of thing. That thing. You know that thing. In the future, it’s the thing everyone looks up to. Not now, of course, now it’s just me looking at it and thinking that’s me, or that will be me.

But I’m not doing that. And that was the future I saw five years ago, and that amount of time back then had been five years. Yet here I am, five years passed by, and I’m not doing that thing. Not even thinking about it. Me being the person that I am, not the person I planned to be, even the person I wanted to be.

So now, after the crash, I could go forward and adapt and affix back to the track I had been on. That’s the way things are done. Always done. I could. I could most definitely.

One thing occurred to me while I was on my own, between the crash and the firemen in their truck yip yapping with dispatch. I looked out into the woods and I thought to myself: “Well, what happens between here and there?”

I asked that to me. I tried to answer, but I didn’t know the answer. Didn’t know how to put it. All the words I needed couldn’t reach far enough into the place where that answer and all other answers I wanted reside. All I could do then, and can do now, is look.

Look and wait, but keep looking.