When the stars don't look upon you

There are certain times in life when you feel saying that things aren't going your way is a perfect understatement. Times when you know life has it's ebbs and flows, but sometimes the ebb is unending, and just keeps pulling you down, no matter what.

My mother says this particular phase I'm going through right now, has many positives inside the negatives, just tiny little pieces, that when pieced together, comes as protection at the most essential point, despite the seemingly everlasting streak of bad luck that seems to be coming my way.

I've yet to make sense of it, I've yet to figure out the answers as to why these things happen.

I'm lucky to be alive today, and so is my mum. We were both involved in a major car crash about two weeks ago, where a 17-year-old came the wrong way up my lane, heading straight for me on a motorway. I swerved to avoid a head-on collission, my car skidded, lost control, went off the road, over the grass, into the parking lot of a McDs, hit a parked vehicle. The impact swung my car around, and we continued moving and hit another parked vehicle, before coming to a stop.

The car's a write-off. It can't be anything but. The whole front is gone. Two more inches, and we'd have gone too.

I can't say much more on this, for legal reasons.

We're alive, and we're thankful. In those immediate post-accident trauma filled minutes, you don't remember much, even as you're recounting things to the police in a voice clear as summer, eyes straight ahead on the ceiling lights of the rural hospital. You say it like you write an exam - you know it's importance, but you're not really digesting the facts. You vomit them out and hope that's the end of it, that it'll all go away.

And then watching your nearest loved one suffer so much next to you in the hospital, and you tied to your stretcher with belts, you wonder what you'd done wrong.

On the road.

In your life.

How you make another suffer because of you.

"But it's not your fault!" they say. So many of them.

"You're just having survivor's remorse". I had no idea what the label meant, but what a lovely thing to actually have that label. How nicely I'd be able to spout that in conversations, and look like a martyr.

But in the emergency room, when you don't know if your mother's ever going to walk again, you doubt if you ever saw that car, whether you'd dreamt it up.

When your mother sees you on your feet for the first time since the accident and breaks down in relief, you can't be bothered with whose fault it was, you just assume it was yours.

And then people come, and you wake up to the world.

First it was Ram and his mum, driving all the way in the night from Brisbane, to be with us. Proving egos can be set aside at times of life and death. You hope for a renewal of bonds, and even initiate spending the weekend at his place sometime later.

The family calls from Malaysia - you're strong and clear when you speak to your father, addressing the doctor in him. You collapse when you talk to your uncle, a messy heap recounting the first ten minutes post-accident when you thought your mother'd become paraplegic.

You speak to your friends who'd received your messages - some reassuring you about work, some wanting all the details, some just downright scared of losing you. And you're grateful they're all there, in some form or another.

And yet, you know it's a time when the ultimate powers that be in the biggest corporation of them all, are not very pleased with your latest memo, and have sent you one in return. All coded up in a language only they know. You have only the one keyword, supplied into your brain from the moment the sight outside your car windscreen seemed like Monet had made a movie. The keyword that pops up at every subsequent disappointment, trying to fit itself into it's current context, yet uncomfortably dissatisfied. The keyword "WHY".

I'm still trying to decode it. I've acted on previous rough drafts of what I feel are the answers, and come away with great disappointment. Perhaps I won't get the proper search results till months from now, once the legal case is settled, and misery is a memory. But till then, I continue my decoding unconsciously, in my dreams, in my blogs, in my most private moments when I look out the window at the world and try to find my spot in it.