I'm awake!

Trigger warnings: car crash, drowning.

Dark clouds hung in the distance over the ocean. Waves were crashing on the hard-packed sand, much bigger than I’d ever seen. I was a passenger in my cousin’s old, yellow VW bus as she drove us along the low road that seemed it might get washed away by a strong high tide any day. We loved that road, and her bus, almost as much as the shore. Racing the storm, we wanted to reach our favorite rocky outcropping to watch it. Although we suspected the drive might be scary, those waves were utterly terrifying.

“Wow, I’ve never seen waves like that!” I said with a low breath, wondering if tsunamis were possible in this area. I’d never heard of one, but I’d also never seen waves that intimidating in person. Even the surfers had abandoned the shore for this storm. I’d never seen that before, either.

“Oh my god,” my cousin’s voice echoed my own awe. We couldn’t look away until the van began bouncing as we both realized she’d veered off the edge of the road and into some large rocks. We both screamed, and she jerked the wheel back towards the road - and the water. She over-corrected and we were bouncing off the other edge, onto the packed sand.

“What are you doing?” I screamed. Panic filled her eyes as the van refused to cooperate with her steering efforts. The sand was wetter than we thought, and she struggled to regain control. An enormous wave created a heavy spray of salt water onto the windshield and another two or three inches of water under the tires.

“We’re hydroplaning!” I yelled at her, “you can’t drive like this!” I knew my words were not helpful, but I couldn’t think of the ones I needed to say to her. I wanted to tell her she was going too fast, and steering too hard, left and right, back and forth, not giving the tires a chance to find a grip. She’d never driven in snow, having lived her entire life here by the shore, and she’d never been good at driving in rainstorms, so she did not know what to do in this very unusual situation.

These thoughts, loud and expansive in my head, but only lasting microseconds, were useless because I couldn’t get them out of my mouth. She wouldn’t have registered them anyway. Her eyes were wide and wild, her hands moving left over right, right over left, back and forth with her failed attempts at steering. We were heading towards the gargantuan waves now, with no hope of stopping. We were going into the ocean.

A beast of a wave slammed into us, or us into it—no matter, it was bad. I braced myself for the impact, one hand on the dashboard, one on my passenger door window. Something in the back of my brain reminded me that you shouldn’t go stiff before an impact because you’re more likely to get a bone broken, so at the last millisecond I bent my elbows and pulled my hands to my temples, hoping for the best. We lurched forward and back; the sound was deafening. I couldn’t differentiate between the sounds—crashing wave, groans of the old van, our own screaming.

The water was deeper than I could believe; it was covering most of the van. Had the monster wave pulled us offshore more than expected? We were bobbing but also running into the bottom; I wasn’t sure if the jarring booms were sand or water. My mind raced. I thought about how funny it was that time slows down during moments of crisis. I was having so many thoughts, faster than I should be able to think. We were being tossed about, and I waited for water to rush in, but it wasn’t coming yet. All the windows were closed and somehow had not imploded. I panicked about whether we’d be able to kick any of them out if we went completely underwater. Or if that was even a good option. If water rushed in, could we get out fast enough to not drown? I did not want to drown. I’d grown up on the water, I had immense respect for the water, and I always thought that drowning would be one of the most awful ways to go. Holding your breath, knowing that your next inhale would be liquid and the end of you. Terrifying.

No. I did not want to drown. I would not accept this fate. I’d released my seatbelt and was being tossed about inside the van now. My cousin had done the same. We weren’t communicating, both of us in a panic, unsure of what to do. It was too intense; I couldn’t stand it. Then I realized…

Real life is never this intense and terrifying. I was dreaming; I had to be. This is a trick I’d learned when I was younger, when I was having recurrent night terrors. Real life is never that intense or terrifying. I’d taught myself to recognize terror as not real and could wake myself up or at least stop the nightmare in its tracks and walk the other way into a calmer dreamland.

Moving my hands over my ears, I started yelling, “I’m awake! I’m awake!” The dream began ripping off of me, as violent as the waves. My head spun inside and out as I worried that maybe this was real after all, but I kept screaming. “I’m awake! I’m awake!” And with one final rip inside my head, I was standing just outside the snack shack on the beach where we liked to buy cool acai bowls on hot days.

My cousin was beside me. We both laughed a little, shaking off the terror. The water was behind the shack, so we couldn’t see it from where we stood. Relief and disbelief coursed through our veins as we stared at each other for a few seconds, then both turned to walk around the small building. As the shoreline came into view, we could see it.

“You drove into the water!” I laughed and pointed at the yellow rectangle bobbing just offshore. She laughed, too.

“There it is!” she laughed. We watched it with curiosity. Then it dawned on us. Neither of us wanted to say it aloud. We squinted and tried to see the van more clearly.

I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to believe it. She said it first.

“Is that… us?”

We could see two bodies being tossed around inside of water-filled van. They weren’t moving of their own volition.

“Are we…”

I saw my lifeless body press against the window for a second and disappear again. Then part of hers.

“Are we dead?” She was barely audible.

“No, no, of course not. We’re just dreaming.” I said, not believing it myself.

“We’re not moving.”

My arm (one in the van, not one attached to me on the beach) moved toward my face (also the one in the van). “Look! I’m holding my nose! I’m alive!” It made little sense as I said it, and the look on my cousin’s face almost made me laugh… except that I was worried we were dead.

I tried again. “No! This is an out-of-body experience! We’re going to be fine! Look, there’s someone on the shore pointing at us!” Pointing at our lifeless bodies bobbing offshore in the flooded yellow VW bus. She shot me another “are you an idiot?” look, eyes wide, eyebrows raised.

I looked back at the scene again. If this was an out-of-body thing, how would we get back into those bodies? The waves were still pounding, and the bus was not coming back to shore; it was being pulled out further.

“Oh.” I finally said. Damn, I thought inside my head. “This sucks.”