Adam ran his fingers through his mixed blond hair, making it stick up at the back in a lazy, tangled mess. His breathing was shallow and ragged and his form slumped against pavement covered in broken beer bottles and cigarette butts. His eyes, rimmed in red, kept a constant watch over his surroundings, yet they betrayed the dimmed, defeated look of a man given up. His hand dropped from his head and came to rest on a tattered bible. The last hope of the desperate and dying.
With a sigh, Adam raised himself to a slouched sitting position. Trying to ignore the lingering odor of drugs, vomit and urine, he opened the bible and fingered a small photo protected beneath the ancient cover lovingly tracing his fingers over the beautiful woman captured forever with the ghost of a laugh on her face. "Macy" Adam whispered, his lips cracking and his voice weak and forced. The sound of traffic and the boom of the city barely registered as Adam's rapt attention was focused solidly on the small photo. He had lost it all, everything he treasured most. Painful memories crashed through his mind. He would have cried, if dehydration had not sapped the last of his tears. Cried for the beautiful Araya, sweet in every way. His heart ached as he relived the moment in which he had taken her from life, taken her and left himself free to live. If you could call this living, Adam laughed dryly to himself. Existing was more like it, existing and wasting away.
He had been married before, had found true happiness and love. Something that had eluded him for so long. But as he had watched his beautiful wife, watched her life entwine with his, the dreams began. Dreams that caused him to startle awake as he saw Araya crumple and fall, her eyes open and lifeless, her kind and beautiful soul taken forever by the speeding bullet of a vehicle that stole her life. That he, himself, had driven.
