Asklemmy

Does it count if I don't really remember it? I was 8. It was a week before summer break. I was waiting for my mother to come home from work (sitting on the front steps to our house). A friend of mine called me across the street. I went. I didn't make it to the other side. Hit and run driver crashed right into me, dragged me half a block and left me for dead. Neighbors said he didn't even look back. They never caught him. I don't remember waking up in the ambulance. I had a head wound and a broken leg (compound fracture, pierced the skin). I remember them having to set the bone and then take me to another hospital (a children's hospital). I remember being drugged. And waking up to my mom sleeping in the chair next to me. I have no memory of anything from the time I was crossing the street to the time I was in the ICU at the first hospital. They wouldn't let me move my head. I don't remember being scared or in pain or anything until they had to set the bone to straighten out my leg to splint it.

Even the aftermath (10 weeks in a body cast that went from my breast bone down to cover everything but the toes of my broken leg) is kind of a hazy mess. Except that I then fell down the stairs and broke my arm too. Added insult to injury.

I've been on a motorcycle for over 25 years now and I've had some near misses but nothing serious.

That's an amazing story and lucky you for making it through. I've known of two people in my circle who died from motorcycle accidents and a few more in my community and region who died .... it's also amazing to realize that you don't need to be riding fast in order to get killed on a motorcycle. One woman in my town was at an intersection, moved across in an awkward way, got hit by a truck and neither were moving fast, she just got hit in a particular way, knocked down, pinned down by the truck, crushed and then died on the way to the hospital.

My near death experience was not as dramatic as yours. I was a dumb teen on a four wheeler on gravel. I did a major jump without knowing it out expecting it, launched about 20 feet in the air, landed front wheels first, launched forward and smashed my face in the gravel. Thankfully the atv went flying in a different direction and didn't land on me. I also didn't have a helmet on. I didn't get knocked out and I was aware the whole time. I was just lucky I was fit strong and landed in a lucky way that didn't hurt me too much.

I have a cousin who fell off an atv as a passenger, landed the wrong way, hit her head (again no helmet) severely injured, treated in hospital for a day before she died from injuries.

Motorcycles and ATV are dangerous machines

I've had the whole life flashing before your eyes thing.

The night I lost my virginity. Got high with this girl and watched a movie that was terrible and then we ended up hooking up and I'd put so much expectation into what sex was going to be like that when it actually came to it it just wasn't what I thought it would be.

Couldn't cum. So after doing everything I could possibly think of to do for about an hour I gave up and really shittily faked my orgasm and then I took the girl home.

Got back home and I blue balled myself so I took care of it and right after I came I had an epiphany. Being a kid and hyper sexualized I had messed around with my brother and sister, never going so far is actually having penetrative sex or anything but yeah. All of that shit flashed before my eyes and it hit me like a bolt of lightning out of the blue.

The stress was so much that every single bone in my rib cage right down my sternum cracked. It sounded like a gunshot had gone off. And it set my heart on fire with pain and misery and shame and guilt and an absolute detestation of my very existence that I that that I just I can't express it it's the only thing I understand in this universe to be "ineffable" is what I felt at that moment.

And I don't know if it was a blessing or a curse.

I spoke to my siblings after I had recuperated some and apologized for my wrongdoing in our childhood and for the most part we worked all of that out but God damn. Like, I was not mentally prepared to get drop kicked in the soul on the same night that I lost my virginity.

There were other things going on at that time too. I had been writing poetry and sometimes when I would write poetry I would feel like this flash of fiery warmth and it's like I would automatically know what the poem is going to be and it would flow out of me in this beautiful golden Rush.

I had books and books and books of poems I had written like this.

And I was attempting to write a poem when all of this happened and instead almost like I was possessed like it was automatic writing I wrote out all of my sins on several sheets of paper. My heart burned like someone had dropped an ember of burning hot coal on it as all of my sins were ripped out of me against my will.

It left me so shook that in all of the years since then I have only been able to kind of sort of cry a single time.

It felt like being abandoned by God, or rather it felt like suddenly getting caught by him and immediately thrown into hell for 5 minutes, only to be dragged back out with the fires still licking my skin from the inside and then being left to think about what I had done.

I'm talking about the bad side of it but there was a good side too because it opened my eyes to how I was living and what I was doing and even though I'm still horribly imperfect and terrified of being imperfect but helpless to not be imperfect, I am not as bad as I was I think.

And there were other times too where that same golden warmth would come up to me in the middle of a conversation and I would be talking to someone and all of a sudden I would know exactly what to say and in those moments where this would happen it's like pleasure and joy and fire would rise up out of my heart and reach out to the other person and touch them and in those moments I know the words that I have said have made a positive impact on someone else's life, but they weren't my words, they were the words of this fire and spirit inside of me.

All these years later that fire still burns. It never stops. It cannot be forgotten for me. And no matter how many times I explain it, people just generally do not believe that this actually happened to me. They think that it is a mental break or a bit of psychosis or some self delusion that I have put myself under to deal with the trauma of the incest and unfettered sexual promiscuity of my childhood.

And sometimes I'm afraid that that event was my soul leaving my body. And sometimes I'm afraid that it was the sudden inrush of the inhabitation of God that I had been searching for.

And as far as I know no one else has ever felt the way I feel. I can't find any literature on it. The closest I can relate to are those Christian iconographies of a heart with a crown on it and barbed wire and fire.

But you would think that if that was the inhabitation of God that the inclination to sin would have been driven away from me and yet I still sin just like everybody else.

So I don't know. I don't think I would recommend it to anyone else. Just wish I could meet someone who had been through that and knew what it was and could guide me.

I don't know if that was a near death experienced, but one time I have nearly collapsed when commuting on a bus, after I drank 5 cups of coffee. My blood pressure went through the roof.

It also made me think some things in my life.

Everyone I have met who rode motorcycles has a story like this. Then they lift up their pant leg or shirt to show you ghastly huge scars.

A couple of heart attacks. Only sad when thinking how sad my mom and dog would be if I died. Otherwise, pretty chill. Once the morphine kicked in I didn't care about anything.

Lived in Florida for almost a decade

You were knocked out for a day?

Not really, just some high-speed near-misses on my motorcycle.

You can accidentally double dose on Trazadone like I did and have it feel like life is slipping away as yoy fight with every ounce to keep your eyes open while everything goes dark.

But really you just sleep extra hard.