The Prompt Project

the snow falls. small pinpricks of white against a pitch black background. faces pressed against the window. eyes searching, searching, searching. always searching. I used to love car rides, you know. I used to look out and search for things in the blurred motion of trees and houses and children passing by. I used to strain my eyes to see the things that were never there. things you couldn’t see on your own. I used to search. for happiness. for love. for joy. I never found them. not once.
as the years passed me by I stopped searching for them. i saw other things. things I never looked for. like sadness. and loneliness. I saw death once too. he came for me one night along the highway. bright lights. horn blaring. blinding me. it was dumb luck. if I would’ve turned left…well, I don’t like to think about it. I turned right…right into a snow bank. it was snowing that night too.
they say when someone gets a second chance they do things differently. I never saw much sense in that. but I still come here every year and look at where I almost died.
I get out of the car. keep it running so the engine won’t freeze up and die. the pavement is slick. with salt and snow and dirt. the combination of tears and broken people. they pass us by every day and we don’t even know it. the road is empty so I stand in the middle and wonder. the snow bank is almost exactly the same as all those years ago. to the left there isn’t any room; the trucker would have gotten me for sure… but if he wasn’t there that night, at the rate I was going, I would have wrapped my car around the lamppost a few hundred feet away. it’s funny how things work out.
I shove my hands in my pockets. my breath fogs in the cold air. the soft shhf, shhf, shhf of snow falling fills my ears. it lands in my hair and hangs off my lashes. I close my eyes and let the snow take me. my ears ring with the sound of a blaring horn. déjà vu. I keep my eyes closed.
I knew it was coming before you said anything. we were just too different. young love. tragic love. when I open my eyes, I see death again. I search the falling snow for something, anything, one last time.
blinding white light illuminating snowflakes. no two are ever the same. a smile tugs at my lips. maybe that’s the proof I should have used: “no two are ever the same, but we can make it work.” but I know. that was only a fools dream. you were a firecracker, and no one could have tempered you – not even I, even though I thought I’d gotten closest than anyone before me.
I feel the wind as it rushes closer. it tousles my hair and blows the snow from my shoulders. and then I see it as the snow spins wildly around me. I see your face this one last time, and that’s enough for me.
the trucker rushes past me, and I find myself in the snow bank once again. I’m spread eagle. the snow falls softly. but I hear it’s screeching protests in my ears. I close my eyes and let the memories wash across my skin the way your fingertips used to.
I sigh. young love has always been a tragic sort of love. I think of a song I used to listen to in highschool. “young love is such dumb love. Call it what you want, it was still enough.” though I can’t recall where it was from or by who, it resonates through my body anyways.
and in the wintery wind with only the snowflakes to witness, I laugh.