14: Jenna K- Kayla and I Almost Died Yesterday

Recently, I reconnected with my childhood best friend, Kayla, after I wrote one of my blogs about my last trip to Disneyland with her. Once she read it, we decided to meet up for lunch to catch up on the three years of each other’s lives we missed. We quickly became best friends again and we even have a trip to Disneyland planned for next month. Well all of that almost changed in an instant when we both almost died yesterday. Kayla and I decided to go to downtown Davis yesterday because we were tired of hanging out around Vacaville. She drove, and I happily sat in the passenger seat because I’m scared of driving on the freeway. We were having a great time, and after stopping in Dixon to get Dutch Bros, we continued our drive to Davis. All was going well until someone in the lane next to us decided she wanted to merge into our lane. She was looking behind her to see if any cars were coming, but she failed to see that we were right next to her. She proceeded to drift into our lane and come inches away from hitting us, so Kayla, obviously not wanting to get hit, swerved out of the way. Since she turned so abruptly at such high speeds, the car lost control and we started swerving back and forth in between lanes, and we even ended up driving on the shoulder a few times. The tires were screeching, I was yelling Kayla’s name repeatedly (like that was going to solve our problem), and she was bringing out her inner Vin Diesel trying to get control of her car while yelling “OH MY GOD I’M SO SORRY JENNA.” Luckily, she managed to regain control before we ended up upside down in a ditch (she was swerving so sharply that we thought the car would flip) or crashing into someone else. I told her to take a random exit and pull over somewhere so we could calm down. And after a few minutes we were laughing extremely hard at the experience we went through. It was the most terrifying moment i’ve ever experienced, but within five minutes we were sitting in the middle of nowhere laughing to the point of tears. That’s always been a constant in our friendship over the years. In the hardest or scariest moments, Kayla and I have never failed to make each other feel better (and laugh at the most inappropriate moments, such as our near death experience). The one thing I remember her saying during our fit of laughter was, “WE JUST GOT EACH OTHER BACK AS BEST FRIENDS AND WE ALMOST JUST DIED TOGETHER!” When we were sitting at the dead end in the middle of nowhere, we vowed never to tell anyone this story, but then we decided to write this week’s blog about it. I have more memories with Kayla than I have with anyone else, and this will definitely be a core memory to add to the list.