Holding My Breath [Wattys 2016]

5 6 ~ A n n a

                 

Flashback ~ December 30, 2010

My biggest fear is something that surrounds me. It's something that we experience every day, pay no mind to, and never quite see coming or going.

But if we lost it, we would be nothing.

Time.

It's such a simple word, something so common that nobody ever thinks we could lose it one day. I don't fear time itself, exactly. Just the fact that it's finite. For me, one day, it will run out.

I look back at my life and I see a slideshow of memories. I see my fifth birthday party when I popped the bouncy house with a pencil and ruined it all. I see myself just a year ago, standing in the ocean.

And then I see the bridge, the lake, the crash.

I never thought that my time with my family would end so soon. I always thought that my parents would see me graduate, that my dad would walk me down the aisle.

I never thought my life would be like this.

It's like the rug has been pulled out from under me. It's all some cruel joke, like life is laughing and thinking, "Ha! Watch her suffer!"

Everything, every moment, only comes once, and I can't experience it all. I always try to capture the moment; always wish I could go back when it had passed.

That's what I'm afraid of when the car swerves. I don't fear for my life, for the fact that this would probably be it. I don't fear the fact that my family is going to die too. I only think that time is being cut too short, for all of us, for me.

Toby hasn't even had a chance to live yet and now he is going to die. I haven't even graduated high school and now I'm going to die. My parents haven't gotten to finish everything they started, grow old together. Now they are going to die too.

The only thing I can hear is the screams. Not just mine, or Toby's. Not just my parents. I hear the screams of the brakes, struggling to fight against the wheels. I hear the scream of the wind, circling around us as we turn, reaching us through the open window.

It's a moment I will never forget, a time of pure fear, the pure terror that I can't even put into words. Like time escapes me for just that moment so that I can live forever, hear those screams anytime I close my eyes.

One moment we are plummeting off of the vacant bridge, spinning to the side. And there is nothing else but the smooth turn of the car falling through the air. I hold on tightly to the seat in front of me, regretting my move to unbuckle my seatbelt.

It's like flying, gliding. I don't realize what is coming next until it's too late.

Then it hits me like a gunshot. If Caesar took me by surprise, then I am not prepared for this. The impact of the car against the water is like hitting concrete. It's life against death. It sounds like crunching metal.

I hadn't seen much on the way down. There was the man in the road, Caesar, a brief flash before the swerve. There was a glimpse of the sky, the reflection of our car falling in the water, but mostly it was just the seat in front of me and the dream catcher falling from the mirror in the front.

Whenever we went on car trips, I would sleep the whole time we traveled. One day we stopped at this little shop for a break on our way to the beach.

I had just woken up, and inside the shop were all of these little knick-knacks. Chimes, dolls and glass figurines. My mom had seen a little dream catcher and bought it while I was in the bathroom.

We hung it on the mirror in the front seat. "To hold off your bad dreams," she had said.

But it isn't here to protect me now. That is another thing I will never forget, watching it fall.

The water fills the car in seconds. Suddenly I'm not breathing anymore, I'm choking. My lungs are burning with the icy black liquid, the shock waking me up and shutting me down at the same time.

I didn't have time to think, or to move fast enough to change what would happen next.

But I don't think it would have mattered. I couldn't have saved them, not by myself.

Caesar made sure of that.