He was so tired. When he jolted himself away for a third time, he was face to face with the headlights….
Your move, writer.
That jolt-and-headlights moment is a gift because it drops your reader straight into the body before the brain catches up — so many ways to ride that.
You could stay in the adrenaline and write pure survival: the swerve, the horn, the half-second where his life becomes a physics problem, and what he does with the one choice he gets. Or slow the clock down instead — let the headlights freeze him in place, and use that suspended beat to flash back through why he was so tired in the first place, turning a near-miss into a story about exhaustion, grief, or overwork finally catching up to him. There's also a quieter, tender road: someone else is driving that car, and the headlights aren't an ending but an unlikely beginning — a stranger, a rescue, a reason to stay awake.
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