Have you ever noticed that you tend to clearly remember traumatic experiences in your life? According to several studies by the National Institutes of Health in the US, negative memories are somehow prioritized by the brain for processing because they are often derived from emotional or high-stress situations.

It certainly is the case for me as I recall what happened almost two decades ago. I was around 11 years old when I was riding my bicycle inside our village. The streets weren’t full of cars back then, but I did my best to stay as close to the right-side curb as possible just to give oncoming traffic a wide berth.

From a distance, I saw this black Nissan Sentra B13 coming in the opposite lane. Again, I made sure that I was sticking to the curb. But just as I thought we were going to pass each other without incident, this Sentra suddenly steered into me. I remember squeezing both brake levers in panic, and my back wheel lifting off the ground as a result.

As quickly as the Nissan drove into me, it turned back to its original lane. The car’s windows were rolled down, and I saw four young men laughing hysterically at my face turning pale from fear. When I got back home and told my grandfather about my experience, it didn’t help that I got yelled at for supposedly putting myself in danger.

This is the reason why I have never mustered the courage to ride a bicycle outside the confines of our village. My mind is always filled with the possibility of being killed or maimed on busy roads. And even now that I have taken up cycling as a hobby in New Zealand, images of that black Sentra still haunt me from time to time.

I guess one consolation to this is the last time I saw the car, it was a rotting carcass propped up on jack stands. As for the four people who were aboard it on that fateful day, I hope you’ve all changed your ways for the better.

Let this be my humble plea for motorists to never ever scare the living daylights out of children in the same way the guys in the car did to me. Such an experience can leave emotional scars which can take a very long time to heal. Stupid games do not belong in the same space with mental health and road safety.