FicWad

As I traipsed the cold and dreary road, tire marks smearing the tarmac, the rain washing away the final memories; I realised it was all my fault.

I walked this road a thousand times when I was younger, jumping along the pavement with my brother and friends. Cycling towards the park, or going with my mom for ice cream. I’d had so many good memories of this street, and this tarnished them all. I stopped at the end of the tire tracks, looking upon what she last saw.

The houses were very conservative, not entirely to my taste but I could still appreciate the beauty of them. The one directly to the left of me had thousands of orange flowers which I knew she would have loved.

Maybe she got to see those in the last few seconds. I hope she did.

The more I thought about her, the more the street seemed to be tinged in red. Her smile, and everything was mildly pink. Her laugh, the way she fiddled with her hair when she was nervous, and the orange flowers took on a burgundy hue. I thought about the way we would kiss, how she smelled when we hugged, the way we would say goodbye a hundred times even though we would be seeing each other the next day, and it seemed as if the sky were pouring blood instead of mildly acidic water.

I had to get out of there.

I began to ran, not knowing where I was going or caring that my hood had fallen off allowing the rain to seep into my hair and skin. It was my fault. If I had let her leave when she said she was going, rather than kissing her and holding her too tight, she wouldn’t have been caught up in the accident.

If I had just let her leave like a normal person she would still be alive to see me today. We would be sat in my living room, listening to music or just talking about everything. I just had to keep saying goodbye, I just didn’t want her to leave so soon. I ruined her life. I ruined her families’ lives, her friends’, my own.

I kept running until I could barely breathe. I wasn’t even sure what I was running from anymore, the scene of the accident was so far from where I was, but I think I was trying to run away from myself.

When I finally stopped, I was stop atop a bridge.

This was no good, either. We’d come here a few times to sit by the water, it would never allow me to stop thinking about her and how I’d killed her. But then again, there wasn’t anywhere in this town that we hadn’t been to together, or that didn’t hold some memory that on a normal occasion I would forget but couldn’t help remembering now that she wasn’t around to reminisce with.

My tears mingled with the rain water running down my cheeks, and I decided to sit down. Running wouldn’t get me anywhere because there was no way to get out of my mind. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

She was my one. It seems sappy and stupid, I never thought those sort of things existed either until I met her. But there was, is, no one else I could ever be anywhere near as happy with. No one that I could completely be myself around, or completely trust. I’d just thrown all of that away, so maybe I deserved to die alone.

I’d seen a future with her from the first time we kissed, but I never wanted to rush anything. I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, but I could never understand why she would want the same with me, so I’d held back a little.

I pulled out the ring box I’d had in my pocket for the past month. The ring inside had taken me months to pick out, and a year to save for. It wasn’t the biggest jewel, but it was a brilliant blue, the same sparkling colour of her eyes. There were small diamonds down the shoulders and I’d had the word ‘forever’ engraved on the inner side.

I was planning on giving it to her a week from the date of the accident, on our 2 year anniversary dinner. I hadn’t been able to eat for the past week because of the nerves, and now I couldn’t eat for a completely different reason. If I had just asked her to stay the night, would she have said yes a week later? Instead of spending the rest of eternity in a casket...

I closed my eyes, and a terrifying vision overcame me. Ever since I had bought the ring I’d imagined her in a beautiful white wedding dress walking towards me as I waited at the altar. I had imagined our wedding a million different ways, and she never looked any less stunning. But now the image was corrupted.

Before I’d wanted nothing more than to hold her tight and carry on the rest of our lives together, but now the vision involved a torn and frayed wedding dress floating towards me with nobody inside it. She was gone, and as was the rest of my happiness.

The image flashed to the memory of the accident. Just a few minutes after she left I’d heard sirens blustering down the road, and I’d gone outside to see what was happening, never thinking that the bad news would be coming to me. My neighbour told me there’d been an accident a couple of blocks down, and a young lady was in a critical condition. That was when my heart dropped, and I flung through my door following the sirens.

“It won’t be her” I mumbled to myself as I ran, though of course I would soon find out that I was wrong. I saw a crumpled car, crashed so hard that the entire bumper had been curved around a tree.

Her car.

That was when I saw her, lying in the middle of the road where she’d been flung out of the car.
Paramedics were rushing to the scene, whilst other onlookers gasped at the horrific incident ahead of them. I pushed past some people, not paying attention to who they were or what they were yelling at me, and ran over to her. My only love.

Her eyes were still open, but I could see the life leaving them. Policemen tried to drag me away and I shouted and screamed that she was my girlfriend, and they backed off a step. The paramedics were rushing around her body, trying to find signs of life and damage, making sure to not move her too much in case it made things worse.

She moved her eyes a little towards me, although I’m still not sure if she knew whether it was me or not because of the pain. I leaned in and gave her a small peck on the lips, the last kiss I would ever have, before she was hoisted onto a bed and I was pulled away by the cops.
I wasn’t sure when the tears had begun rolling down my face, but they definitely were by that point.

The cops gave me a lift to the hospital, seeing that I couldn’t drive in the state I was in and knowing that the sirens would get me there quicker. They left me waiting for an hour before they confirmed the death. An hour of hope and dread and adrenaline and anguish and depression all rolled into one. I couldn’t leave the hospital until hours after they’d told me, I couldn’t move.

That was sort of similar to how I felt now, only now everything seemed to feel distant. The more I thought about it all, the more it seemed like I was looking onto someone else’s life rather than my own. I felt hollow. There was a mild echo of pain, but then just nothing.

I guessed that this feeling would be the rest of my life now, because I had lost the best thing in it and I had no way of replacing her.

I gave one last look at the ring before throwing the box over the bridge, succumbing to the empty life her death had left behind.