Waiting

They say it all happens in an instant. They’ve never done it. There’s no flash of illuminations then a blackout. There’s no single-second feeling; it’s not swift, not fleeting; it is a lifetime.

Born the moment metal connects to metal, like a clicker-clack, snipper-snap of cracking bones. It is a collision of worlds. Everything stops moving. You are someone else; something else; weightless, unaffected by gravity, untouched by time. Lifting off the leather seats in wingless wandering, held in the air by momentum; you could almost reach out and touch the glass rain drops as they sail past you. They shatter; scatter, pitter-patter on the pavement.

Your first step is the first head-over-heels roll on the hard ground. A moment of pure adrenaline-ecstasy, followed by the first time you trip over. Descending towards the floor like a river of blood forging a path. Hoping that father is there to catch you; his hand tight across your chest. Is his hand stopping the ground from swallowing you whole?

Your first day at school is still the most mortifying. Like a cracking windshield, all your protection seems to shatter. Hearts beating like a runaway train, mind in a haze, it seems to last for days. The ground seems to twist and swirls like an engine snapping in different directions. And all the voices in your head are a choir of steel-crunching, iron-bending forces; battering the earth with shards of terror.

Then there’s your first love, your first kiss; you can still feel it; still see her. She’s next to you now; passenger seat to a lifetime of this. One hand is on the wheel, the other is in hers. All in white, beautiful as the night you ‘made her mine.’ All in a haze; hazy, blazing, crazy, still flying; still in the passenger seat to a metal attack: a crash. There’s a lifetime-flash, it seems to last forever. Is this what you leave the world? A skid mark, dark on the dull pavement. Is this your legacy, a cross on the side of the old road that no one knows had a story.

Just a fleeting lack of judgement; eyes off the pavement, lips on a bottle, going full throttle; Eyes off the road, loss of a lifetime. Is this all I will leave behind?

Beating out of control, the ground is so cold. Colder and colder, growing older and older; where did all the time go? I was only a kid five minutes ago. Now I’m waiting, praying for it to be over; for wheels to stop turning, rubber to stop burning, glass to stop flying, I’ll stop dying. I was backseat to a lifetime.