When I daydream, I imagine a car hits me. Not just tapped a little by someone’s bumper when they were backing out of their parking space at Wendy’s, but full on smashed into by 4 wheels and a ventilation grate. Maybe I wasn’t looking where I was going when crossing the street; maybe I was trying to push a little girl out of the way. Whatever the reason, the car takes me out. It’s so instant I don’t even feel it. Just numbness. Sweet incapacitation.
I dream I am lying there on the asphalt as a team of medics wheel up and clamp a neck brace around my throat. I fantasize that I’m drifting in and out of consciousness, like a bad movie cut just after someone goes into the emergency room, awakening to the beeps and buzzes of machines all around them keeping their vitals in constant tempo. I try to imagine my parents as the police call them to tell them they should come to the hospital. I picture the look of worry that would creep across their faces and whom they’d call on their way there and what their reaction would be.
The lure of this dream, the thing that keeps me coming back to it, playing it over and over again in my head, is that it would break the day to day monotony of my life. It would shake things up. I wouldn’t have to make the mundane decisions I have to make everyday. I wouldn’t have to decide to get up and go to work each morning and I wouldn’t have to think about when or what to eat. I wouldn’t have to try to please people, I wouldn’t have to make decisions about what I’ll be doing with my life, where I’ll be going, or who I’ll be going with. I could just sit in my own little white room, zoning in and out of consciousness under the stupor of morphine and the exhaustion of physical therapy.
I wouldn’t mind it so much, just sitting there all day waiting for my body to heal, watching the sun tick by outside my window. I would have time to think, I would have time to sort out the jumble that has slowly filled my mind, and I would have time to just be.
I could just sit.
Be still.
Write. Escape.