A brief brush with mortality

This'll be a little divergence from my usual edgelord trollfest, as I feel I need to get this little story down before I forget.

I could have died last Sunday. Or, the Sunday before last. July 10th, 2016 to be exact.

I wanted to sleep in that morning, and perhaps I should have, but unfortunately it was not up to me. I was tasked with the honor of driving my dad's minivan to help pick up some visiting relatives from the airport. I was jittery and woozy from sleep deprivation, but I didn't want to argue as I was in no state to say anything intelligible, so I hopped in the driver's seat and off we went. 

All the way through my heart was pounding and my brain was on high alert, but I felt, or somehow knew that no matter how much I tried, I couldn't keep track of everything on the road. It was a terrible feeling. It seemed like I was always missing something, swerving too far to the right while checking the left mirror for space and vice versa, missing whats in front of me while looking in the rearview.
 
We got on the highway and my stress levels rose even higher, as there was pressure to go fast while I knew I didn't have control. To an outside observer it would have looked like pretty smooth sailing, with a few micro-adjustments here and there. That is, until the crux of the event began. I'd say I had a bad feeling about this, but I had already been feeling bad about the whole thing since I got in the car, so...yeah.

The beige sedan currently in front of me was inordinately slow, maybe going 40 miles per hour on a 55 mph speed limit.  I considered changing lanes, but I was not too concerned with time and decided to keep going slow to maintain some semblence of control. Then, the car in front of me merged into the lane on the left. I hit the gas, thinking I had room to speed up, but I soon glimpsed the sight ahead.

There was a truck, one of those big ones with the long trailers, parked on the shoulder lane. It was partially sticking out into the rightmost lane, which is why everyone else had merged to the left and were avoiding it with plenty of space to spare.

But I thought differently. I thought I could squeeze through that narrow gap between the edge of the truck and the nonstop traffic on the left. And it might have been a clean pass through, if I was driving a sedan or something smaller. 

But I wasn't.
 
I thought to myself that I didn't want to involve any cars on the left, but still somehow avoid the truck. It was a tight jam, but fear was strangely absent from my mind at the time. 
Just pressure. Terrible, terrible pressure.
My father yelled repeatedly in the seat next to me, but I didn't stop. I barely even slowed down before it happened.
 
The corner of the truck struck the right side mirror of the van, causing it to swing inwards on the joint and smack into the car door's window with great force.
The entire mirror shattered into countless pieces from the impact, and the pieces flew in a stream past the side of the van. Where the mirror used to be you can see an X sort of pattern molded into the surface with a knob upon which the mirror pane was mounted.
 
Normally this is where you'd expect an adrenaline rush by now, for time to stretch out, for me to suddenly perceive things in slow motion. That didn't happen. Perhaps I was drained of hormones or something from staying up so late the night before.
Events proceeded at full speed, and the van had cleared the truck by the time I had realized what had happened. I don't recall how many motorists honked at me, but there was at least one.
 
Whenever I make a colossal screwup such as this, I get the strong urge to just stop everything and try to...distance myself, avoidance? I resisted the urge, I had to keep going because the highway was the worst place to stop. Or so I keep telling myself.
 
From that point I still had to change lanes several times and get onto a different highway, with a broken right side mirror no less. In my panic it was all I could do to keep from colliding with my immediate surroundings, so the wrong exits were taken and we ended up at a toll plaza.
The thought kept racing through my mind, that I could have died, that my father could have died. To compound matters was the realization that the broken mirror shards could have been strewn all over the road behind me, creating an even bigger hazard.
Eventually I made it off the highway onto some local roads, where I found a suitable place to stop...and let my father take us the rest of the way.

Ironically, the next day I had the last of my scheduled appointments with the driving school. Like every session before, the instructor once again complimented me on how well I drove:
"You're a very good driver, better than most I've taught." 
"I would trust you to drive my car."

Well, I suppose I have this humbling experience now to remind me of my true capacity.

Anyways, I just pulled the meat out of a deli sandwich again. Time to hulk out.