When I was seven, our mother was hit by a drunk driver. She almost died. My brother saw the situation like this: everything in life was cause and effect, therefore, this could not have happened without cause. Therefore, our mother was the cause. He blamed and feared her for her almost-death. Her ghastly swollen face. Purple and then yellow. Her pain. Her way of wanting us nearby, of staying all day in bed. But the difficult thing for me to understand came later. Because after the accident, we remodeled the house, bought new couches (effect). The lawsuit (cause). My mother taking control of her life again—our lives. My mother's business either started or became successful (effect).

I drove drunk once (cause). I was twenty-four. I drove into a snowbank (effect). I was smoking a cigarette and it fell to my lap. Driving slow on a backroad, no other cars. A man was beside me. He took the wheel after. He was drunk too. In bed that night, I thought about the soft collision. The car and the snow. I thought about my mother's car. All that crushed metal. I thought about the new couches. They were large and pink and you could sink into them with your whole body. My mother picked them out. My accident, she said, my couches (effect). I thought about the snow again. The way it both was and wasn't like death: cold and pale. Almost death.

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"Situation Like This" began as a reflection on the difference between me and my brother. I've had this memory of our responses to my mother's car accident: my brother was furious and blamed her for the event, while I bought my mother talismans to protect her. But I knew from the beginning there wasn't enough substance there—not enough self-conviction: I was just a cute kid who bought her mother a stuffed bear. So I knew I needed to include my own experience, to liken myself not to my mother or my brother but to the man who hit my mother, who almost killed her. I originally wrote this essay four times longer than it is now. I wrote and wrote and then cut and cut. The talismans I bought for my mother were cut. The long sequence of my own drunk driving was trimmed to almost nothing. But the couches seemed important. So much like sinking into snow. And the parentheses came later—a way to filter the experience through a kind of cynical and intentionally simplistic lens—cause and effect. The whole piece is an experiment in compression, in giving a skeleton to memory, one that feels whole and complete even if the memories themselves are fragmented. 

One essay that I've returned to again and again, that inspired me here in terms of brevity and weaving narratives together is Matthew Komatsu's ["When We Played"]. It's an incredibly different narrative from mine—but this idea of childhood and adulthood, deep past and more recent past, feels resonant.