With a Bang

In my sixteen years of living I’ve come to learn that people are a lot like cars. All carelessly zooming past each other, trying to get to their destination with little regards for everyone else driving And with all those careless cars you’re bound to have some accidents.
Before my shrink prescribed me Ambien I’d often found myself laying in bed in the early hours of the morning, staring blankly at the ceiling wondering exactly where it all went wrong.
What if I had been mature about the situation? What if I had picked up the phone when she called? What if I had been responsible for the one time in my life where it really mattered?
I guess it’s pretty useless to wonder “what if” because “what if” doesn’t change what happened. “What if” doesn’t bring her back.
My reflection is now a stranger. Some sickly shadow of the girl I used to be, about fifteen pounds lighter whose dull, mousy hair is falling out in clumps and whose skin looks an unhealthy shade gray. Certainly this can’t be the girl who was student government VP or the junior class’ homecoming princess.
Both of the doctors my parents took me to say it’s post traumatic stress mixed with survivor’s guilt, I say it’s karma finally catching up to me.
Its been about three months since the accident. Slowly all the candles at Claire’s memorial had burned out, the stuffed animals had been tossed out in the trash after growing mold from the spring rain, and the handwritten notes’ ink have bled making them eligible. One by one the news stations have left to cover more interesting and less morbid stories, like the Texas senator's affair or that once-upon-a-time A-list celebrity’s court date for a DUI.
And here people have been trying to push the memories the farthest into the deepest corners of their minds they can without technically forgetting. Maybe they’ll build a park in her memory or dedicate the new school wing in her name. And when our children ask us who Claire Owens was, we’ll wear melancholy smiles as we tell them with sweet nostalgia that we remember a beautiful and generous person.
But, since no one else will, I’ll say it: Claire Owens was not a beautiful, generous person.
She was self-centered and shallow and, when she wanted to be, down right vicious.
I know this because she was my best friend.
But I can also tell you that Claire was not a bad person. Nor was she a good person. She was just inevitably careless. A car running red lights and stop signs, cutting people off without so much as a second thought.
I couldn’t tell you why Claire did what she did. She left no note. No extravagant final testimony of the misery that consumed her.
She was just here one day and gone the next.