I have not driven on a highway in four years and I have built an entire life around hiding it.

The accident wasn't even that bad. Nobody died. I got rear-ended at about sixty-five and spun across two lanes and ended up facing traffic on the shoulder, and for maybe four seconds I watched headlights come at me and understood completely that this was it.

Then they went around me. I walked away with whiplash and a totaled Corolla.

That was four years ago. I can drive. I drive every day. Surface streets, thirty-five, forty-five, no problem at all. But the on-ramp does something to me that I cannot argue my way out of. My hands go wet, my vision narrows to a cone, and there is a very clear voice that says you will not survive the merge.

It isn't a thought I'm having. It's a thing that is told to me.

So I take surface streets everywhere. A trip to my sister's that should be forty minutes takes an hour and fifty. I have a whole personality built on this. I'm the guy who "likes the scenic route." I've turned down two promotions that involved regional travel and told HR it was for family reasons.

I've lied to my girlfriend about why we always leave so early.

My father is in a facility two hundred miles away now and I see him about every six weeks instead of every two, and that math is going to run out.

The worst part is that I know exactly what the treatment is. Graded exposure. I looked it up the first year. I just have not done it, and I've had four years, and I'm starting to think the not-doing is the actual condition and the merge is just where it shows.

Has anyone actually done the exposure thing? Not researched it. Done it.