Taking My Breath Away

I didn't imagine my thoughts could ever be physically painful. I never once thought that my chest could constrict in such a way based solely on a single thought. And it's not always the same thought, which is fairly horrifying. How can someone ask me to go about my day as if a single thought couldn't render me breathless? How am I supposed to tell my mother when she thinks I'm making it up? When she thinks that I have a new problem everyday? 
I drove for a little over two and a half hours on old state highways with a friend. Back roads that curved every few miles, trees as far as you can see, and more cows than you can count. We ended up in West Plains, but I had wanted to go to Rome. Rome was down a dirt road I didn't want to take my car down. 
My friend drove on the way home. She's had far more driving experience than I, but for some reason... I felt like I had an elephant sitting on my chest. Every curve I thought we were going to go off road, or a car would clip us and we would spin. I thought I was going to have to relive that weightless feeling as the car rolled side over side. I kept waiting for my luck to run out, but it never did.
And then I got home. And my mother was upset I didn't have my location services on, and that I didn't answer her for an hour. I had dropped my phone in the floor board and was driving fifty-five miles an hour through hills and winding roads, and hick country. She told me when I got home that if I left town without it turned on again she'd beat me (in an ass-whooping way, not abuse). 
"You know what happened last time you left town," she scolded me, with a tone only mothers can achieve. 
"Yeah, I know what happened," I told her in a sigh, and turned to go back to my room. 
"Fine," she quipped as I turned back to look at her, "I'm just going to quit caring about you kids." 
 I couldn't stay to hear the rest of her rant. I didn't need to be reminded about what happened last time. I relive that car crash at least four to six days a week, and it never gets better. The aching in my chest grows, and my heart constricts at the thought.
If someone says my name a certain way, I flinch, and then I'm back in that damn car. There's no escaping it, but I can't quite tell my mother. She'd insist I needed to go to the doctor, to fix this, but I don't need fixing. 
Or maybe I do, and I'm just delusional. I've got to be a little crazy, I'm sitting here writing a blog no one reads. I'm talking to a blank wall and expecting things to get better.
But how can things get better if I can hardly breathe?