A terrible metaphor

I once knew a man, not much younger than myself, about a year or two younger. He found himself the sole victim of a horrific car accident. He wasn't intoxicated, nor was he impaired in any way, he simply veered off the road in the pitch night. The police found him about an hour or two after the crash; he was laying, cut up and bleeding, between the windshield and the interior of the car. (The police painted a picture of the scene to his mother, days later, that did little to sooth her nerves even though she knew he survived.) The forensic engineer who was called in to investigate, after it was proven that the man in the accident wasn't under the influence of a substance, found the cause of the accident to be a failure of the gas pedal releasing as the man's foot let up. In a flash reaction, the man must have veered off the road to prevent himself from crashing into the car ahead of him.

After a couple days in the hospital, a cast on his arm and leg, a few broken ribs, a couple cuts stitched up, and a quick investigation as to the cause of the crash, he found himself back at home, relaxing.

"You ought to be thankful," said his mother, a wiry-haired single mom.

"Of what?" he asked, in complete sincerity.

"That tree. The forensic engineer said the gas pedal failed to release, and if you had gone just a couple more feet and then veered off, you would've gained enough speed for the crash to have been fatal,"

He recalled the scene of the accident: the tree that he collided with was mere yards from a small forest.

He looked down at his arms, at his leg, and mentally felt the sharp cuts where the windshield had torn at his face. He did not at all feel fortunate or thankful.

"Well, lucky for that then," he said, trying to sound truthful as he carefully propped his broken leg up with his healthy arm.

"I'm serious, you need to be thankful. If it weren't for that tree, you wouldn't be here," she spoke again, soft yet stern.

He couldn't help but sense an irony to her method of thinking: if the tree hadn't been there, he wouldn't be in this predicament of broken bones and lacerations. If his gas pedal hadn't failed, he wouldn't have been a temporary cripple, feeding on the loving and caring whim of his single mother. He felt pathetic, and felt his blame sink into the now-charred and broken bark of the tree he collided with.

A couple days later, he visited the site. Nothing more than a couple of minuscule shards of his windshield and his headlights remained on the ground where the accident occurred, yet there was still such a remainder of emotion. He felt himself trembling as he reached for the bark, where his car had collided, with his healthy arm. There was no burning sensation or demonic possession that occurred as he felt it. But he felt anger well up inside him, the likes of which he had never quite tasted. It wasn't a vengeful or an indignant anger, but a type of anger that asked the question, "Why?"

Why did this have to happen to me? He thought. Although the collision proved to be fatal to his car, it merely wounded him for a time.

As if expecting an answer from the broken bark and quivering limbs, he stared at it. Watching the dying emerald and amber leaves shift to and fro in the wind. He took it as a nod of indifference.

His mother thought the tree had saved him, but it was himself. He had veered off the road in time, he had saved the person ahead of him from the condition he (albeit temporarily) now suffered.

For several weeks later, his mother dogged him about his mood. She told him to appreciate the fact that it was not yet his time to go.

Several months later, his mother died in an accident at the same exact tree. The forensic engineer could not find a reason for why the car was handled the way it was right before the collision.

He visits the site occasionally; his mother's grave site more so.

Author's Note

I hate this. I thought it would get better and more clear as I wrote it, but I just hate it. Let me know if you can figure out the metaphor, but I bet I dogged it to crap.