rusty car

Okay, kids. It’s been awhile.

Freddy and I moved, and we’ve yet to set aside the funds (well, the motivation) to set up Internet in our new place. We’d rather spend that money (again, motivation) on late night trips to In-N-Out, to which we now live so close that it’s practically in our living room.

Anyway, I have to schedule weekly visits to the public library to use the Internet. I have grand plans to blog when I’m there, but once I sit down, my mind goes blank. I feel like I have nothing interesting to say. I tried to keep a word document as a blog post, intending to publish it each week, but am I the only one who associates word documents with vomiting up a 16-page research paper two hours before it’s due?

Vomiting. Now there’s a mental picture.

I WILL publish something today. I am so sorry that you keep seeing my cat every time you visit my blog. It’s a really lame post to make you look at more than once.

So last night, I went for a walk around the city. On my way back to my apartment, I saw a gal stopped at a light, hazard lights on. She got out of her car and worriedly looked around.

“Hey! Do you need help?” I called. She nodded enthusiastically, so I ran across the street to see what was up. She ran out of gas at the light; luckily, a Chevron station—a beacon of hope, if you will—glowed just a mere block and a half away.

We started to push and tug on her car, but apparently it’s difficult to push and steer a car with the effort of only two really lanky girls, especially if one of those girls had a broken arm, which that girl did.

Suddenly, a guy showed up. He didn’t speak English, but we figured he was offering to help, because we didn’t know why else a person would approach a dead car in the middle of the street (…yikes, writing that certainly made me realize there could’ve been a few reasons). So, he started to push with us, and the car slowly picked up momentum until we were all running to keep up with it.

It was in this moment that I thought of those scenes in movies like Space Jam or Apollo 13 where they show a point in the starry universe, and slowly that point moves past meteor showers and space junk, picking up speed until it’s speeding through our galaxy, zeroing in on our planet, penetrating our atmosphere, and then zooming straight down on a country, on a city, on a street.

And I thought about how if my life were a movie, that point would land on me. That point—that small speck in our expansive, ever-growing, infinite universe—would land on me in my Crocs with socks and my coon skin hat, grunting behind a car with a girl with a broken arm and a guy who didn’t speak English.

Of all the places to be and things to do.

Only months before, I was sitting in a psychiatrist’s windowless office. The laughing, the crying, the crying, the crying, the sore muscles, the sallow skin, the slivery slices on my thighs, the panic attacks—all this added up to the horrible achy residue that was more than just the grand conflict of living with a peeled back heart.

In fact, it added up to the sum of four letters: You have PTSD, Dr. Brink said. PTSD. The letters floated across the room, and I chewed and swallowed them one by one until they ended up side by side inside my stomach: post traumatic stress disorder.

It’s trite, really. Here you are reading ANOTHER blog post about someone whose living has temporarily taken over her life.

BUT,

I’m willing to bet that you have yet to read a post about a girl running behind a rusty car with two strangers late at night.

Am I right?

Kristin Brown Photography