Friendship is a strange and wonderful thing, and I mean both strange and wonderful in the fullest sense of the words.
Tonight I was driving with my best friend since freshman year of high school when she said something that completely summed up our friendship. It was something along the lines of, “What, decided not to try and kill me tonight?”
You see, we are both very good drivers, and we’ve always been very cautious drivers… except when we’re in a car together. At those times, things just go awry. It isn’t that we’re being reckless or goofing off, we just become Stupid Drivers. We’ve not yet had any actual accidents together –mine have all been solo, she was in a fender-bender with another mutual friend in the car– but there have been plenty of near-misses.
This one was typical. We were on our way from dinner to do a bit of quick shopping, and I needed to make a left-hand turn. It looked like there was plenty of room before the oncoming car would reach us, and I stepped on the accelerator. And as soon as I felt the car start to move, I thought of all the times we’d come so close to a bad outcome, and I braked almost before we started moving.
Not an unwise decision, it turns out, since the oncoming car was moving faster than it appeared. Had I kept going, we probably would have made it through unscathed, but for once I forced the Stupid out of my head and made the responsible driver take charge. I do know that we’ve been lucky so far, and I don’t want our luck to run out while I’m the one behind the wheel.
So yes, tonight I decided not to try to kill you. We’ve got something too strange and wonderful to risk.
