Adebelle

It’s 8.41am and I was driving on a rather busy NPE. My patience got the better of me as the traffic on the right lane merely moved an inch. That stretch of road seems to be the bottleneck… it’s jammed practicall every morning and it’s really annoying. Flashing my signal, I got my car out from the bad standstill to the moving left lane. I was rather reluctant to drive on the left lane (even though it’s moving) simply because there were lots of ‘mat kool’s’ speeding on that lane. I have two bad experiences resulted in minor car accidents when my car and a motorbike collided.

One minute after switching lane; few meters away from my car, a white Proton Wira decided to switch to the left. It was so abrupt that I stopped singing along with Coldplay, thinking out loud that how reckless that driver was and his impatience and selfish act could have gotten someone hurt… In what it seems to be less than a split second, I heard a loud ‘bang’… It happened so quickly right in front of my eyes!!!

I was petrified, there was nothing that separated my car and the poor guy who was lying quite lifeless on the road. I had both hands on my mouth, I guess I was scared that I would scream (even though there was no one but myself in the car). It was still very hard for me to believe what I saw… I glanced nervously on the road, where the poor guy lied, no sign of blood… thanks goodness! His friend was frantically nudging him. More motorcyclists stopped by. The white Wira pulled over but the driver was nowhere in sight.

I was so afriad that the poor man would start bleeding. I had to leave before my stomach started to get sick. I felt so much for the man lying on the ground… I thought I was crying… I needed to get out of the scene!! Quickly, I flashed the right signal and off I went… At the corner of my eyes, I saw the reckless driver, still sitting in his car, with his wife. A middle aged man should have ‘eaten enough salt’ to ‘pandu cermat di jalan raya’… Such a shame… a shame!

All the way to the office, I kept thinking about the could have been’s. It could have been me. I could have been the reckless driver (didn’t I switch lane at my own will like he did?) The driver could have avoided the accident should he be more patient. He could have gone to work on time should he checked the road carefully before he switched. He could have ended the precious life of an innocent road user… It wasn’t wrong for this Proton Wira driver to take a chance in his life but it’s simply wrong for him to take a chance that put other’s life at risk. It’s a shame that sometimes, I do take bad chances like that too.