Dear Phantom Driver,

You don't know my name or what I look like or the kind of family that I have waiting for me back at home. You don't know the future that you could have just taken from a couple of college students. You don't know that I still grip the seat anytime I'm in a car, making a turn, because my body expects me to spin out of control.

You don't know any of this because you didn't stop.

While you remain faceless in my mind, you have impacted my life more than most people I actually know. I don't thank you for the accident, but I do thank you for what it taught me. You taught me about moments of impact.

I say moments because they are not definite periods of time. They range from seconds to even minutes and, while the accident may have taken just seconds to happen, it felt like an indefinite period of time. Each second felt like its own story with different lessons or thoughts going through my head.

Since you missed it, I'll share with you a few of these moments. As you forced us off of the road and we lost control of the vehicle, the timer started. At first, I thought it was done and, then, our car gripped the road again, just in time to spin out of control in front of both lanes of traffic going 80 miles per hour. During that time, the cliche, "My life flashed before my eyes," became horrifyingly real.

One Mississippi: A peace came over me. I couldn't hear noises and all I could say to my friend as I grabbed her arm was, "It's going to be okay." But I couldn't hear her scream or yell, nor do I remember her doing so. It was an experience that I can only describe as putting your ear up to a conch shell and hearing the sound of the ocean.

Two Mississippi: Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the second truck that would be hitting us shortly, so I prepared myself. I looked into my friend's eyes and I learned more about her than I had in the past year and a half. I looked at her, as I thought about my family, my friends, and everything that matters to me, but I also saw hers flash before her eyes.

Three Mississippi: Moment of impact. We got hit. My head flew forward and all I remember was thinking three things. My mom was going to kill me because I forgot to tell her that we were going out of town that day. I think I read somewhere not to be stiff because that causes more injuries in car accidents. And it was weird that the air bag didn't deploy.

Four Mississippi: We flew off of the road onto the other side and came inches from hitting the guard rail. I watched you drive away, as the necklace that I bought the day before broke and slid off of my neck and into my lap.

Five Mississippi: As my friend cried and shook uncontrollably, I just told her to squeeze my hand and tried to remain calm because I knew that one of us had to. I made a joke about how my new necklace broke to lighten the mood, but, apparently, it was too soon for jokes.

After that, the timer stopped and time began to have the opposite effect. It took an hour to go through police reports and exchange information but it felt like a few minutes. I stood in a daze as the policeman, driver, and wrecker told us how they couldn't believe that the car didn't flip and that, at that speed and in that situation, they had seen few people walk away alive. The other truck driver was on her way to a rodeo and even made a joke about how we just barely missed the 8 second mark.

All I could think about were moments of impact— literal and figurative. The impact of watching you drive away and question my faith in humanity has hit me harder than that second truck ever could. Luckily, you taught me a hard life lesson with the fewest possible injuries.

Thank you, nameless driver, not for the pain you caused or for the damage done to my friend's car and definitely not for driving off without caring what had happened to us. Thank you for forcing me to realize who and what matters most and teaching me that life can easily be taken in fewer seconds than a bull ride.

Sincerely, the impacted stranger

P.S. I promise that I'll tell my parents the next time that I go out of town and there will be a genuine "I love you" at the end, just in case I encounter another 18-wheeler like you.