SOLACE (condensed version)

2012

JANUARY

l feel numb. I walk shakily across the busy road, the smell of fuel and rubber and not much else filling my nostrils. I am halfway across when I become overwhelmed by the most heartbreaking smell in the world.

How can a natural smell feel so incredibly unnatural?

A scent that, up until this moment, had represented happiness and celebration? It hits me like a wall, a solid wall of floral scent in a place it simply does not belong. It is everywhere, filling every sense. It is all I can see; all I can smell. I can feel and hear the plastic bouquet wrapping crinkling between my hands. The flowers are so overwhelmingly powerful; I can taste them.

The site is covered by a ten-metre block of hundreds of bouquets of flowers – it has almost covered all the horror on the ground, along the road. Almost. There are still bits of glass and metal and blood and police tape on the outskirts of the pile of flowers.

The most confronting evidence of the horror, however, is the tree.

Snapped clean in half, a side mirror by its trunk. A side mirror belonging to his car, the car I was in 24 hours earlier, the car that had no longer resembled a car when it got towed away in separate chunks of warped metal.

It could have been me. Perhaps it should have been me – she had more to offer this world than I, no argument.

She had already achieved so much, was ready and willing to achieve so much more. She has an awe-inspiring force of purity and goodness and wholesomeness and every other warm fuzzy feeling a human can experience. She has incredible potential.

Had.

She had incredible potential. And now it has gone, ceased.

Just like her.

Why has nothing else ceased? Why are cars still barrelling up and down the road either side of this site? Why are birds still singing, and people still out exercising and my lungs still working?

The world has stopped, hasn't it?

For a moment, a fleeting moment, everything does cease. It's almost like I'm stuck in a photograph; everything is frozen, other than a distant sound. The sound grows louder, and louder, and it is everywhere, and I cannot escape it.

It is a brutal, gut wrenching sound of torture, heartache, of pain.

A sound that is the opposite of everything she was, the opposite of every feeling she ever made us all feel.

It is me. I am making that sound.

It feels like when you're having a nightmare and trying to scream but your mouth is too dry to scream and instead all you can manage is a strangled, guttural cry of anguish.

I can't stop it; I can't breathe or think or move another inch. My knees buckle and I start to fall but that's ok because I want to fall and hit the ground because then I will get swallowed up by the earth and I will disappear; and maybe if I disappear then this pain will disappear too and I will find peace.

My knees hit the ground, but I don't get swallowed up, I don't disappear, and I certainly don't feel peace.

I don't think I will ever feel peace again.

Poor Sophie, I think to myself. I need Andy.

                              ************
I don't remember leaving the site of the crash. I just vaguely notice that I'm sitting in bed, and Justin is holding my hand. I don't know how much time has passed. Justin is talking to me, but I can't hear him through all the fog in my brain, and soon enough he gives up and pulls out his phone, his face showing pain and discomfort.