A Bizarre Reality

with Amanda on my sturdy 1993 Ford Tempo.. exactly one week before its destruction

Have you ever been hanging out and then, the next thing you know, you wake up and find yourself in a hospital bed? You see people you know in the room with you, but you’re not sure why any of you are there. They seem to know what’s going on, but you’re too afraid to ask them. You think that, if you ask, they’ll think you’re stupid for not knowing. Really, you know that they wouldn’t, but you feel stupid for not knowing. Through analyzing various conversations and reading personal messages, you ultimately discover that it has been about a week since your last formed memory. You also find out that you have been awake for some of that time period and are even shown pictures of yourself, awake, from days before you remember waking up. In the photos, you have cuts and scrapes under your chin and on your neck. You don’t feel those wounds when you reach up and you don’t see them in the mirror when you check for them. Where have you been? And what happened to you?

..how awkward..

It is a confusing reality, but a reality nonetheless. And, I must say, it is no less confusing five years after the fact. I am still questioning what happened that summer night in 2007. It’s like a giant puzzle that I’ve slowly been piecing together over the years, but the image is blurry and I’m missing most of the pieces.

my car?

At some point within the first couple days of waking up, I caught on to the fact that I was in a car crash. I say ‘fact’ now, but I wasn’t completely sold on that then. I mean, it made sense to some extent; it explained why I couldn’t remember things and why I wasn’t able to walk. However, I couldn’t grasp that I, Mikayla Koble, could have something really bizarre and life-threatening happen to me. That kind of stuff only happens to motivational speakers and I knew that I hated talking in front of groups. With that seamless reasoning, I was in denial. Within the first month or so, I was shown pictures of my car. Proof? Could have been staged, right? Yeah, probably. If it had been a real event, I would have remembered it.

One day, when I was walking again, I went along to the impound lot to see my car for myself. And I got to go inside the fence. My trusty Tempo looked even worse than in the pictures I’d seen. Looking inside the car, I spotted my green Old Navy flip-flops; the right shoe in the passenger’s side and the left shoe actually wrapped around one of the pedals in the driver’s side. My dad untangled that flip-flop for me and I took the pair home, along with a Rosary ring lying in the car. Seeing the car and some evidence that I was probably inside of it, I was a little more convinced that the crash actually did happen. But it still didn’t seem completely real. Regardless of my feelings, though, I had to move on with my life.

Over these past five years, I’ve asked some questions and have tried to figure out just what happened that night. With what I’ve gathered, I have put a story together, but that’s what it has become: a story. I touched on that a bit in the last post, but it has been difficult to connect to the crash. I feel like I just woke up into a bizarre new reality without any cause. I’ve been living with the effects, but even those I don’t quite understand. When I tell the story of the crash, I’m throwing in a bunch of guesses and things I’ve heard other people say about the event. I’d like to have a more clear account of what happened. Maybe it is unnecessary, but when I tell the story, I want to tell it as it was. If any of you readers remember details about the ordeal, I’d love to hear them, whether serious or silly, I enjoy hearing stories.

..For a more detailed description about my waking up, check out I Wake Up.