There are few things more violent than two cars colliding at high speed. Metal screams and glass sprays and rubber smokes. Within it what chance does a human body have? We are liquid and tissue. As fragile a thing as there is. It’s like how people describe it, and not. It’s slow, and not. The moment stretches out and it doesn’t. I have a thought, both simple and complex. In its simplest form: I have killed us. In it’s most complex it becomes the days I will never have, the children I will never kiss. It lives deep, this thought. It is all of me and somewhere inside it, inside this infinite intimacy, is Niall Lynch.
I pulled this quote not for its representation of the story (which I liked pretty well, in spite of my trouble with its back and forth through place and time narrative ), but rather, for the way it describes something of my own experience. And doesn’t. The fact that I have no memory of my own metal-screaming, glass-spraying moment as it played out high in a mountain pass on drizzly, Monday morning in June, nearly 16 years ago, haunts me still. Somehow, contained in that one moment, which I cannot remember, is all my possibility and imagination for the future, and the pin that popped the bubble.
Dear Martin – Nic Stone