The car stalled at an intersection today. Save one polite beep, no one honked. The car sat there like that, still and indifferent at the head of the line, unmoving from one red light to the next, like a kid who’d surrendered the race the moment he heard the whistle, contrary and stubborn, placid. I looked up, thinking this was supposed to have been fixed two weeks ago, the streetlights blurred colours, and the engine grumbled back to life.

Fifteen minutes earlier I’d narrowly escaped a collision at another intersection. The thing about accidents that almost happened is that they didn’t happen: they’re the opposite of memory, the absence of an event. You drive on, calm because that’s just how unremarkable survival is. Afterwards it occurs to you that instead of driving straight on as you did, you might have made some attempt in those three seconds to avert the collision, turned right or turned left, instead of sitting there, saying noncommittally to the no one who’s sitting with you, “I’m going to hit that car,” like you were stating the solution to a mathematical problem, that one and one makes two. Your hands and your feet stay in the usual places they’re in when you’re driving, as all the film re-enactments you’ve seen of vehicle collisions project themselves onto your inner eye, and you can already begin to see the passenger side of the car in front of you begin to crumple, the metal wrinkling outwards like a fist unfurling its fingers. You are aware not only of the rapidly shrinking space between the two cars, but of all the other vehicles gathered around the two of you, the patient arena they’ve created around the spectacle you’re about to present. Your fingers remain loose at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel; no part of you attempts to acknowledge what’s happening, what is about to happen.

Aloofness or apathy, delayed reaction times, whatever it was, that saved you. Turning or slowing would have had disastrous results. You just kept moving, and three seconds later you’re coasting over the swell of the bridge, thinking about nothing.