always crashing in the same car

What a glorious life! he said, moments before the car hit. Both were travelling slowly and neither hurt beyond mild whiplash and, in his case, a two-inch laceration upon his forehead which must have happened when his head hit the steering wheel. He climbed quickly from the driver’s seat and rushed to the other vehicle. A woman was behind the wheel, apparently well, muttering apologies and bizarre declarations and obviously deeply in shock. He asked her how she was and helped her out of the car, then wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and sat her on a bench at the roadside and waited for an ambulance to come. He knelt in front of her and helped her to control her breathing by gesturing with his arm in a vertical motion, quickly at first and gradually reducing the speed and urging her to do similar with her breathing. After several minutes when she had begun to breathe in a more regular manner he asked if she smoked, and although she said she didn’t she also said that at a time like this of trauma and similar it might be prudent to start. He lit two cigarettes and they each smoked one, their cars smoking also just lightly from beneath their bonnets. Two recovery vehicles arrived at the scene perhaps five minutes later, to lift their damaged cars off of the road and on to a garage premises of their choosing. As luck would have it, they both lived within a couples of streets of each other within the same generic suburban neighbourhood on the city’s deprived northern edge – although they did not recognise and likely had never encountered each other before this event – and utilised the same local garage premises for MOTs and other such minor repair or mechanically oriented works. Small world, laughed the recovery operatives, and they both had to agree. Once the cars had been removed he noted to her the absurdity of a world in which the response time for the safe rescue and removal of two modest vehicles was so much faster than that of two living human beings. She smirked and agreed with his analysis: the world was a crazy place. He held her hand tentatively and she gripped his back. A traumatic event of this nature inspires this kind of boldness, a desire to make life happen all the more quickly without the pointless pleasantries and expectations to which our interactions usually adhere. He thought but didn’t say this.

Given the non-threatening nature of their injuries their conveyance to A&E occurred within the same ambulance, and throughout the short journey their conversation became increasingly relaxed and then, gradually, quite intimate, and by the time the paramedics had booked the two of them into the reception area they both felt as though they had known the other for a great number of years, and felt familiar with not only their respective presents but also their pasts and how their futures might now occur. Whilst they were sure some parsimonious detractors might denounce the pacing of their active relationship to itself be the product of shock or even the desperate need for comfort or closeness of a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, they felt differently, and were certain that their meeting – even through violent accident as had been the case – was “meant to be”, so to speak, and although neither used the term fate – for who were they to bandy such terms about? – they certainly described something very much akin to what would commonly be understood by it, that their paths had to cross in whatever way the universe deemed suitable to orchestrate. They were taken off to separate treatment areas to be administered to, his own taking slightly longer than hers as his laceration required three reparative stitches, but they reconvened by prior arrangement within the hospital’s meagre catering facility. He purchased two machine lattes – her favourite – and they drank them together and talked without interval, and she carefully wiped some dry blood from his face with a dampened tissue. When he thought of the crashing cars and her cloud-white face behind the wheel he felt stronger, as though a burden had been relieved.

When those lattes and two further lattes like them and some biscotti she had found in her handbag were consumed, and with both their cars gone, he suggested they share a taxi to their respective houses in order to cut costs, and although she agreed to the suggestion both in principle and from a fiscally astute perspective she proposed instead the both of them going back to her house. He thought about this for some minutes before its implications solidified in his mind, and he not only consented to the proposed course of action but explained also how he desired her with a force that would in other circumstances of some similarity be completely inexplicable, a desire so great that a physical union at the earliest possible opportunity was the only outcome he could consider being in any way fulfilling at this pivotal juncture in his and her – he hoped – shared lives. She placed her open palm on one side of his face and appeared deeply moved, and explained that she was seldom so reckless in her emotional attachments but felt somehow as though the impact of the vehicles had released something long buried within her which she absolutely refused to ignore but would instead nurture and grow with everything she had. They walked arm in arm to the waiting taxi and shared the back seat like post-theatre lovers. “Been through the wars eh?” the driver asked them, no doubt observing his stitches and her very slight bruising and deducing the worst. “Quite the opposite,” she said, gripping his hand as she did so. The rest of the journey occurred in only silence and quiet radio.

At her place they fucked as need demanded, and the brow-furrowing intensity of the climax was such that his stitches popped open as he otherwise popped off, which they both found to be humorous. She tended the wound gently and when the bleeding had begun to subside applied some new Steri-Strips from her own bathroom cabinet. They fucked again several more times throughout the hours that followed in great waves of euphoric carnality the likes of which neither had ever before experienced, as though time were simultaneously both quickening and slowing with every thrust and clench of their bodies. By dawn they were engaged and desperately elated with it, and regardless of how crazy or impulsive or spontaneous it was they had never been more certain that a decision was the right one, and not a voice on the earth would be able to convince them otherwise. As the morning passed they telephoned significant or pertinent family members, all of whom responded with surprise and often doubt if not disgust but were soon however reluctantly persuaded by the intensity of the declarations and by tell of the profoundly life-changing traumatic experience they heard, any that weren’t all but ejected from the couple’s sense of familial consciousness and unity, their ties of blood now severed in the name of love.

The months passed in overwhelming happiness and the couple grew ever closer until their identities merged and they become one indistinguishable whole which, rather than being oppressive or in some way creepy was remarkable and liberating and precious, as though prior to their meeting their whole lives had been unfulfilled and forged of absence only, lacks completely remedied by their physical and emotional union. As they went about their daily tasks of work or miscellany they missed each other to tears but relished the hysterical passion of their evening reunions as though their separation had been of years and not mere hours. They were inseparable in ways that incited commentary from friends and loved ones, indeed inseparable in ways that began – they said, these friends and loved ones – as cute but were soon considered unhealthy, even harmful, the friends drifting from their circle like distant memories or dreams until their unit tightened and collapsed further still like a mighty black hole from which no love could hope to escape.

A fortnight prior to their wedding he had finished work over an hour late and his sadistic miser of a manager had expected him to complete a particularly involved task and had made it quite clear that to not do so was simply not an option, and was then driving home through the largely empty city streets immersed in wild webs of fantasy relating to his fiancé, her face, her painted fingernails, her vocalisations, her wonderful vagina. What a glorious life! he said, moments before the car hit. They had both been travelling slowly, thank goodness, and he climbed quickly from the driver’s seat and rushed to the other vehicle. A woman was behind the wheel, apparently well, muttering apologies and bizarre declarations and obviously deeply in shock. He asked her how she was and helped her out of the car, then wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and sat her on a bench at the roadside and waited for an ambulance to come. She was profoundly attractive and he felt very calm and perceived the rush of the future as he reached into his pocket for cigarettes and thumbed his phone off as he did so.