Walking - something so simple, yet we take it for granted every day. Something much bigger, such as life, is so precious, and yet it can be pulled out from under us in an instant. We don’t realize how quickly it can be taken. My friends and I realized this one summer night, when a fun time took a turn for the worse.
It was a starry, summer night in Hays, America. Tessa, Jordan, and I were driving around, doing the normal activities for a summer night. I just got a new car, so driving around had been a typical event on most nights. We started running out of ideas around nine o’clock, so we hit up the local convenience store, Cerv’s, and got ourselves some snowballs. The subject about where we should go after that came up, and Jordan had mentioned that he had never been out to City Lights. This is the perfect spot to just hang out with friends. It’s out in the country, secluded from civilization, where you can sit and look at the city all lit up. It’s quite beautiful, actually. It takes about ten minutes to get out there, so we decided to head out. Once there, we opened the back of my car, sat down, and just took in the amazing scenery. I checked my phone and looked on some social media sites to find out if anyone else had plans for the night. I noticed that someone tweeted about a car accident that occurred near Hoxie, Kansas. I sent my friend Andrea a text and asked what happened. She was a complete mess. The two teenagers in the car accident were close friends of hers. She told me that the driver was airlifted to Wichita, but the passenger hadn’t been so lucky. He died at the scene of the accident. It really got me to thinking about life. What if I got in an accident? Would anyone care? We started to get bored and decided it was a good time to head back into town. There’s a certain road that we usually take to get back. It has a bunch of hills, so it almost feels as if you’re on a rollercoaster when you drive on it. On our way there, we just couldn’t stop talking about the accident. “People just keep tweeting about it,” Tessa would say, or “How did they even wreck?” Questions kept flying through our minds. We finally reached the hilly road to take on the way out. I questioned myself for a second there, debating on whether we should take the road or not. I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach that it wasn’t a good idea. I turned anyways, and we found ourselves flying up and down the hills. When we reached the top of the last one, something was waiting for us at the bottom. I slammed on the breaks, the dirt under the tires made the car seem out of my control - everything was just a bunch of blurs and flashes, and I couldn’t see anything, until we finally came to a stop in the ditch. We flipped my car. I honestly think we flipped my car. I threw my attention towards the back seat to check on Tessa and Jordan. For a second, I couldn’t see a thing. There was no one there, until Tessa and Jordan appeared in my sight. Thank God they’re okay. When I saw their faces, their eyes were wide open from shock. Tears filled our eyes as we tried to escape from the barriers of my car. None of the doors would open, and we panicked. Jordan noticed that one of the windows was about half way down. He shoved the rest of the glass into the opening and made a way for us to get out of the car. Once Jordan was out, he helped Tessa, and then me. We checked to see if anyone had any major injuries, and as Jordan was checking Tessa, I tried to stand up and fell to the ground immediately afterwards. Why can’t I stand up? I looked to my right foot for the answer to my question, and there it was, plain as day. At the back of my ankle was a large gash, with blood dripping on the ground. Jordan noticed that I was sitting there and came to see what was going on. He freaked out and told me to go sit on the road. Once he made sure Tessa was okay, he came to check out the damage done to my ankle.
“It looks really bad, Tads,” was all he could say when