Trigger (back to trauma)

I have read about soldiers with PTSD being triggered by loud
  noises and sudden
     movements that put them
back
   in the war zone

My trigger isn't as obviously scary as
   explosions or gunfire

It's the sun
The sun in my eyes
the sun in my eyes while I'm riding in a car or
   worse, driving

The sun was in my eyes that morning,
from around 7:30 to 8am,
coming up the Southern Highway from Managua center

Otto says the sun in one's eyes makes
  everyone
  sleepy, not just me but since

I can't remember the accident, and I
   remember feeling sleepy with the
 sun in my eyes,
I am terrified that my body somehow
  gave in and
  lost control and
  let the Pathfinder plow into two sisters waiting for the bus
      to go to work

Yesterday we were on a winding road,
  coming back from the monestary at Montserrat,
           (near Barcelona,
   a sacred place and home of the Black Madonna
    but that's another story)

I was in the back seat
There's nothing wrong with falling asleep in the back seat, right?
and yet
   when my lids grew heavy from the
sun in my eyes, it was
Anguish

That awful half-awake-yet- dreaming-state took over
I fell
   backward off the edge of control
  into my nightmarish imagined trajectory of an accident in which I
somehow, horrifically,
fall

asleep,
unwillingly relax my body and
BOOM!
get dragged back to wakefulness by
airbags and carnage.
Trauma flashback from an
           unreliable source

I no one knows if this is how the accident
really happened

the police concluded I had "excessive velocity" which
makes sense only if my foot had become lead with sleep
     or by unholy possession
I always drove slowly up that hill
I was the one who still slowed down even after the
     government removed the
         life-saving speed bumps in the name of
               improving fuel economy

I had been the one writing letters to the police about
    basic traffic safety issues
and Nissan had issued a warning to mechanics
      that the airbags were detonating spontaneously
        a warning that apparently did not reach Nicaragua, or went
              unheeded in a country where airbags are the exception
   not the norm

Given all the above, nevertheless,
Because the last thing I remember was feeling sleepy and the
first thing I remember is being
body-slammed
by the airbags,
feeling sleepy
    in a moving vehicle
         facing the sun is my
Trigger