"If you need to crash, then crash and burn, you're not alone"

This weekend, I died.

Or I thought I did.
It ended up not being quite the life-changing experience one might think, but only, I think, because I didn't actually come anywhere near to death.

Let me set the scene...I'm driving, after a day of mild boy drama, to go pick up my friend Colin. We planned to go see The Prestige, but I was running late so it was going to end up being The Departed. I was on this creepy stretch of road, being tailgated. Two ambulances, both (I assume) carrying injured people, are coming down the road towards myself and the car behind me. I slow down and start pulling to the side...

One ambulance goes by....then the other...then there's a screech of tires and loud bang of metal. The kind that comes from big crashes, hard crashes. The kind people die in.

I thought the car behind me had hit me. My car was still moving forward. With the siren lights flashing, and the extreme dark from the stretch of road, and my utter shock over I didn't know what had been hit if it wasn't me...somehow, in my mind, I leapt to the strange conclusion: I had just been killed in a car accident.

I thought about all the things I still wanted to do, the things other people still wanted me to do. I thought about Craig, and how neither of us would ever see if this whatever was going to amount to anything -- that was probably the most sorrowful thing I thought. I thought about Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. I thought about how Colin was never going to get to see a movie tonight.
All of these thoughts lasted probably a nanosecond, all coinciding in my mind. And then I glanced at the rearview mirror. I don't know where the car that had been behind me was. All I could see was the pickup truck.

All I can figure is the second ambulance somehow must have hit it. The thing went flying across the lane I was in -- I do mean fly, I don't think the tires were touching the road at all -- and into the woods.

And, God forgive me, I slammed on my accelerator and got the hell out of there.