A Car Wreck

She seemed calm, the girl that was sitting on the side of the road, holding her knees to her chest and staring at her crushed car. She looked unhappy, but intact, and stable. She had no bruises. She had just missed the end. She had called several people, and now everyone was coming to take care of the problem.

She was too young for this. She didn't need to worry about insurance and liability. She had been through enough.

It helped that he was there to sit by her. She didn't notice him at first, but after a moment, and after a soft shoulder-bump, she knew he was there and she almost cried on his shoulder in front of his parents and the police and the truck that almost killed her.

Her parents got there and hugged her. Her friends came and they stood on the side of the road to offer support. They had to move her car from the intersection so that no one else would hit it too.

Her parents started talking to his parents. It was, she thought, a terrible way for them to meet.

The sky was in turmoil. The clouds couldn't decide if they wanted to rain or not, and the sun was setting with furious red tendrils throughout the gray. Everything in the shadows of the tall pines along the road seemed black and white. She can't remember if she saw any other colours besides the gray and the red and the anger.

She was cold. They gave her a jacket. It was soft and nice and warm, and then he held her.

It wasn't anything different, she told herself. Just a hug because he knew it was rough, because he knew she was scared.

She was in shock, they told her. It didn't seem like what everyone said shock was like. She thought it should have been more epic, but it wasn't. They were alright with her quietness, she thought, because she was always like that. Well, for the time, she was. She was softer then. The wreck should have made her rough again, but she wasn't. She was quiet mostly. Inside, though. Panic attack. Total panic. Fear. Why she could stand up by herself, she'd never know. She still doesn't know.

She wrote about him, about what happened. All her friends at school found out, but they didn't know. They shouldn't know, but it's one of those things, she thinks, that only a few people would get.

He doesn't know what her favourite memory is. Even though it's over and it's going to stay over, no matter how much she hopes that it would stop being over, he still doesn't know. She never did tell him. Standing there, in the black and white, not hearing any sound (or just not remembering it), holding her tiny Bible in her hand while hugging him, underneath the livid sky with red fingers reaching across in vain for her, like angels having their mission called off just before they accomplish it. There, underneath the crumbling of the sky, in the shadows of the trees, in terror and panic and silence, he held her, and that is her favourite memory.

When it all began, when her mind decided she couldn't let go. She can't let go. So she remembers the car wreck and feels the knots in her chest and the lead in her heart melt and untie, like the warmth of a winter sun inside a car that isn't running, with the feeling of random and unintentional shoulder-bumps.

She misses that warmth. She tries to replicate it. It doesn't work. She gives up for a while, and then she remembers again, and tries again. It still doesn't work. And she wonders if that car wreck happened on purpose. She wonders if she was kept to experience this insanity, with everything in her trying and longing to tell him everything she could possibly fit into words, and the fear of losing what she knows she can't afford to not have anymore.

It's still her favourite memory, though.