It was a warm night in July.
The air was still and every star in the sky sparkled like glass shattered throughout the heavens.
I remember thinking that the leather of my steering wheel seemed strangely cold and smooth.
I was alone—or at least I was when I left the party.
The house had been packed. It had been full of people I knew.
They had asked if I wanted a ride home.
I laughed—knowing that they had had more than me, or had they?
I wasn’t drunk. That’s what I told them.
So I left.
I climbed into my car, ignoring the seatbelt—believing if anyone could keep me safe it was I.
And I drove.
The radio had to have been playing.
It always was when I was driving, but when I think back that’s not the sound I hear.
I was almost home.
I was rounding the corner onto the street that my house is on.
I was so close. If I had gone a mile further I would have been in view of my home. But in the end that made no difference—because in an instant, I was no longer alone on the street.
The second car had been bigger than mine. A black suburban is what I was caught a glimpse of—it is what I later saw crumpled and broken.
But even that is hard to remember.
What is clear is simple and above the buzzed and blurred horror, in the end it was the glass that stuck—the glass that shattered and scared my memory, the glass that led my gaze across the pavement of which my head rested, the glass that brought my gaze to figure limp behind the wheel of that black suburban.
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