The Last Tuesday

The whole world seemed to be moving in slow motion, through time that felt sped up. The cold night around me contracted and contorted as I drove down the winding deserted road leading away from the party.

I was drunk, and I knew it. My head throbbed with every bass note that pounded through the music and my words came out slurred as I sang along to it.

My stomach felt warm and the beer in my hand felt cold and my vision was blurred so that the whole world looked like i was seeing it through 3D glasses.

But I couldn't care less.

It was Christmas Eve, and all around me lights flickered and glowed, like stars tangled in the bushes. I watched them zoom by, their light smeared in the wind as I pushed the gas petal harder with my foot. It still felt like I was barely moving.

Suddenly the road was ending before I had time to finish my train of thought, before I had time to break, before I had time to do anything besides peel my eyes away from the twinkling lights shrinking in the distance.

My arms felt heavy on the wheel and my heart pulsed blindly through the night as I collided with it, hard. Thick brown bark and cold frosty air shattered the windshield.

I reached my hand in front of me to stop it, to shield myself, but as I did I found it slamming into the frozen ground instead.

The pain did not come gracefully, and it did not come quiet. It thundered down on me, and I could feel myself crumble under its crushing weight. It screamed in my veins and up my arm and through my chest and across my head as I lay in the ringing silence, staring at the shattered glass all around me.

My breath came in erratic, heaving gasps, the broken fragments of it rattleing inside my ribcage. I fought for air until the pulsing of my heartbeat was all I could hear, thrumming like the music I had been listening to only moments ago.

But the panic never did hit me.

I don't know how long I stayed there, my mind numb but my body awake with pain. The pounding in my head was echoing around me and the burn in my lungs was all I could breathe.

I kept my eyes trained on a single shard of glass wedged inside my palm, which was all of me that I could see. If I tried hard enough, I could tell myself it was just another Christmas light as it reflected the moons glow in my face. Just another fallen star in a world of stars. It wasn't a big deal.

None of this was.

I could feel myself slipping from reality, the threads of my consciousness I so fervently clung to unraveling.

My already obscured vision blurred beyond my control, until I really couldn't tell the glass from the stars around me.

Slowly I felt myself fading. And somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that I was dying, as sure as I knew the sun would still rise tommorow and the earth would still be spinning weeks from now.

And it didn't matter.

I could say that I had never been more confused, or scared, in my life as the whole world seemed to be falling around me. But I would be lying. After all, I had nothing to be scared for. Nobody would be missing me, and quite frankly I wouldn't be missing the world much either. I would pass quietly through this life, leaving nothing behind me to show that I was ever here in the first place. And isn't that how it should be? I did not live, I survived. And so I would not die, I would cease to exist altogether.

Blackness, as thick and infinite as the sky slowly swallowed me, lacing itself through my vision, stealing the sound of my heartbeat in my ears and my breath in my throat and the pulse under my skin.