That Time a Faerie Changed My Tire

I was leaving Carol’s Crystal Castle in Bolingbrook many moons ago, just merging into traffic on the highway when I heard it, “You’re about to get a flat tire”.

I knew this voice. This was not the crazy-making voice in my head, the one that causes me to question my decisions and my worth born out of my anxiety and trauma. This was the clear voice, calm, the one that lets me know what I need to know when I need to know it, the one that comes from a source that feels higher, loving, one that’s got my back.

I merged onto the 55 and stayed in the right lane, driving carefully, trusting what I had heard. It’s a weird place to be in, knowing something is about to happen that hasn’t yet happened, so all you can do is prepare and wait. About two minutes later I felt it, one of my back tires blew. I pulled over onto the shoulder, put the car in park, and dropped my head for a moment against the steering wheel with my eyes closed, asking for help.

He was already pulling over in front of me before I’d even fully raised my head.

“Serge from Russia,” he said in a heavy accent when I asked him his name. He was young and slender with dark hair and driving a car that looked to be in worse shape than mine.

I went around back and opened the trunk. He took out the spare and other necessary items to change the tire as cars whizzed past us. He was fast, as in standing up and dusting off his hands before I even knew he’d finished fast. He threw my old tire and the jack into the trunk as I went to get my purse from the front seat to give him some money.

As I backed myself out of my car after grabbing my purse which was on the floor of the passenger side of it, I looked up to see that he was already gone, vanished, disappeared, he and his car. I mean, perhaps he just sped away so fast that I missed it, but the third-dimensional laws of physics tell me that’s probably not what happened. I would have seen his little red car merging into traffic. He was only out of my line of sight for just a few seconds.

It wasn’t the first time I had encountered what appeared to be a faerie/guide/angel/you name it operating in human form, but it certainly was one of the most memorable. I like to think that the faerie who constructed this costume was having some fun with me, naming himself “Serge” and giving himself such a heavy accent.

Listening and asking for help.

The listening thing is something I seem to have come into this life with, only canceling it out with my sometimes need to be the loudest voice in the room. The asking for help bit, well, that has been slower to come. The receiving help with no direct reciprocation, this I am still working on.

I think this was one of the main lessons of that whole blown tire Serge experience. I tried to pay for the help instead of just receiving it and was denied. I’m actually just realizing this right now, twenty-six years later, as I am typing this.

Somewhere out there is a faerie yelling, “Finally!” in a heavy Russian accent.

If you’re not a paid subscriber to my Substack and would like to support my ad-free and independent writing, you can use the donate button here, or consider becoming a paid subscriber if you’re reading regularly and enjoying it. Every little bit helps.