No Longer

Quietly she stood, shying back from the crowd.  She knew, somewhere in her mind, she should be hysterical right now.  Just like everyone else, crying and screaming.  Her eyes began to wander, but her vision was blurred.  Feeling quite faint, she simply walked off campus.  It didn’t matter anymore.  None of it mattered.

          Walking into the near by woods, she fell to her knees gasping for air.  Her hands clenched tightly around her rib cage, and her chest was pounding.  It felt as though her entire being were being torn apart. The pain seared like she were getting burned alive.

          Over and over she saw it.  Carl’s car slid across the ice in the parking lot.  Herself, Leah, was in the passenger seat.  It was late that night, and they were only trying to turn around.  In front of the school building, she vividly remembered the blood gushing from his neck and chest.  It took everything in her not to scream, she was careful to keep him calm.  “I am in love with you Carl.” She whispered in his ear, his body going limp.

          The ambulance, the sirens, the long night in the hospital, it seemed as if it were ages ago.  All of that in such a blur, she could remember four words very clearly when she asked to see her fiancé.  “He didn’t make it.”  These words came from a male nurse, and they were said harshly, bluntly, coldly. 

          She couldn’t believe it.  She wouldn’t believe it!  Nothing seemed real anymore, but she would not accept the facts.  Walking in to school, facing a crowd of mourning grieving students, no one even held her hand for support.  It all flew through her now.

          The pain was so immense.  How it hurt to accept it, to open her eyes to a reality she now realized she couldn’t bare.  Carl wouldn’t, or more so couldn’t, hold her hand anymore.  She was alone.  He was gone. Until she is to die herself, he will be gone.

          Seventeen years old and madly in love, that’s who she was until Saturday night.  Wait, no, she took that back.  She was still seventeen, and definitely still madly in love.  No longer was it that she would be engaged.  Her future was no longer promised.  She swore to the day that without him, she couldn’t be happy.  Without him, she couldn’t live.

By: Andria Dawn McMillen