Takahiro Miyagawa
Frightening Car Experience
I’ve never felt so close to death since that night. It was the longest seconds of my driving experience. This short story occurred in my homeland, Kozu island near Tokyo, Japan, where I have spent most of the time of my life. This is a very beautiful and splendid island. What I like about the island is that there are many narrow and winding roads that crazy drivers would love to drive on; I was the one of the crazy drivers on the island. I was driving a car in the middle of the night, and my friend’s car was following me behind my car. It was just before our favorite place of my island. I was so confident driving a car on the island. I knew every corner, curve and length of the roads. I was confident probably because I had been driving for two years, and I had gotten a driver’s license too. At that age of my life, my biggest interest was car driving or controlling a car as I want it to be, so I always brought myself up to mountain-road, and drove down a hill from the peak of the road. I was determined to consider myself the fastest driver on my island. Therefore, I loved to speed and hear the noise of wheels with this overconfidence, as well as this night.
At first, I was behind my friend’s car, driving my small and light minivan. I was thinking nothing about chasing or racing, so I was driving safely and nicely until my friend sent me the sign of “ready?” putting the hazard lights on. When doing this to the car behind you, it means the begging of a race, and he knew this from a racing video game that I had.
We started to race, and I realized that my friend was actually driving so well and fast, so I decided to do what it takes to conquer this event. We were going down a hill with an amazing speed. It was probably at least 60 km/hr., quite fast on this narrow and winding road. The wheels were screaming like a hysterical woman, and the gravitation was dancing from left to right. Also, I