I almost slammed into the TPLEX barrier. What stopped me wasn't skill.
The drive down from Baguio was perfect. It was past 5:30pm. Rain came fast on the highway and unexpected. I had the headlights on, both hands on the wheel, and a running list of tomorrow's problems cycling through my head: two morning meetings, back-to-back. The report after. The proposals. That legal matter that had been quietly waiting for my attention for weeks.
Seems natural — the moment things feel smooth, your brain immediately jumps ahead to the next problem.
Then the car stopped being mine.
It's the only way I can describe it. Something grabbed the steering wheel. The rear fishtailed. We drifted toward the barrier.
The car hydroplaned. It's when your tires ride up on a thin film of water and lose contact with the road entirely. No steering. No brakes. You're a passenger in your own vehicle.
The hydroplaning lasted two or three seconds. But as a driver, it felt like a lifetime. Especially with my family in the car.
I fought every instinct to slam the brakes, because somewhere underneath the panic, I knew that would make it worse. I let go of the gas. The car slowed. The tires grabbed the road again.
I felt the road's rumble come back through the steering wheel and I allowed myself to breathe again.
With the rain pouring still, we pulled into the nearest gas station. I declared dinner break even though nobody was hungry. We ate in silence — the kind of silence that means everyone knows what almost happened but nobody wants to say it out loud.
Funny. I had been physically in the car the whole drive — but I wasn't really there. I was in tomorrow. In the meetings. In the proposals. In the anxiety I'd been quietly maintaining for hours like it was a responsibility.
The car sliding fixed that in three seconds.
I don't have a clean ending to this. I'm still the person who drives through a storm while rehearsing tomorrow in his head. But I think about the rumble coming back through the steering wheel, the relief so physical it almost had a sound. That feeling of "oh, I'm here."
I wish I knew how to find it without the hydroplaning.