I remember it is late, nearly midnight, and dark. I am heading to meet someone who is finishing off her shift at work. It is July and it is snowing.

The snow is wet, practically slush being dumped right on top of the city, and thick. The roads of course are a mess. The street lights are reflecting off the flakes of snow, and it almost looks like thick fog, but it is snow.

There is music playing loud through the speakers. The Sugar Twins, who I think are very charming.

I remember thinking I should not have left the house, that it is not safe to be driving on this dark road covered in thick slush, and that I should perhaps turn around. I remember next telling myself to stop worrying. It’s just a little unexpected snow. And anyway, I’m almost there.

Before the traffic lights (where today there is now a massive concrete interchange but back then there was just a set of traffic lights), the two-lane road splits around a median of concrete and grass, the right lane curving farther to the right, and the left lane farther left.

It is dark and wet and the snow looks like fog and the car doesn’t curve farther to the right and the Hyundai Accent bounces gracefully across the median like a flat white rock skipping across a moonlit pond.

When everything stops moving, which doesn’t take much time at all, the Korean-made hatchback is sitting in the empty oncoming traffic lane, the motor still running, the Sugar Twins still singing out of the speakers.

I sit there for a moment to let my mind catch up with the rest of me.

I open the door and get out of the car. It is cold and wet. An SUV pulls over and a man inside asks if I am OK. I say I am fine, thanks, and I just need to change this tire, which no longer looks like a tire.

I have an emergency kit in the trunk, and inside there is a flare. I light the flare on the road naively thinking it will stop any passing cars from running into me or my car.

A police cruiser pulls up, and red and blue lights stop any passing cars from running into me or my car.

I take out a sweater and the spare tire and the jack and the tire iron. What remains of the original tire, an empty shell of shredded black rubber, is soon lying on the road in the snow. The spare tire, a small useless replacement, will not fit.

My heart sinks, and I try again to make it fit, but it doesn’t. The police officer says, in that case, fill out this form. He says the repairs will be expensive. The snow is still falling.

As the car skipped across the median, the left-hand front tire hit a small metal stub of what used to be an important fluorescent sign alerting drivers to avoid the median, and everything underneath the car — there are probably technical names for it all that I don’t know — bent backwards.

Cold and wet and miserable, but unhurt, I solemnly call a tow truck. Two weeks and more than a thousand dollars later, I have my car back. And my first accident is behind me.

That was years ago, and I no longer have the Hyundai Accent and I no longer have any car, imported or otherwise. I’ve been in other accidents, smaller fender benders mostly, as a passenger and once in the Accent again, that one in a parking lot, though never been seriously injured.

Car accidents, even small ones, disrupt our sense of security in the world. They make us say, “It could have been worse,” and that makes us think about “worse.”

It reminds me of parachutes not opening, of rollercoasters lifting off the tracks. It reminds me that at work I callously refer to horrible, grisly collisions in which people die as Fatals. It reminds me of plane crashes, of explosions, of the Jaws of Life, of buses plunging down the sides of mountains and disappearing into the trees.

Yesterday, on a road covered with ice during the first real snowfall of this year, the car I was riding in was hit from behind, and there was a loud crash and we were jolted forward into our seatbelts. We sat there for a moment to let our minds catch up with the rest of us, and everyone was fine, but then I thought, well, it could have been worse.