For the few seconds that he is floating, he stargazes at the traffic lights and street lamps. 

His eyes are squinted; the lights stretch into vertical beams, dancing as his body flies through the air. His vision smears into a dirty composition of the past few seconds, like the exposure on his lens of the world has been set far too high.

Each light glimmering from the city skyline follows him, like shooting stars, until his head makes contact with the concrete mattress beneath him. The falling heavenly bodies halt, becoming blurrier and murkier like a drop of watercolor making contact with dampened paper. One side of his head – he can’t tell left or right – feels warm, feels wet, feels like he is melting into the Earth as the world around him dims, as liquid velvet red curtains are drawn in front of his eyes. Before the curtains close, he notices two massive glaring lights to his side, staring at him. They look sorrowful.

Darkness.

He remembers that as a teenager, he once shut himself into the bathroom of his apartment, turned off the lights and stuffed a towel into the crack of the door to see just how dark it could get. That wasn’t true darkness though. This time, he drifts in nothingness, with no expectation for the reemergence of light, but he doesn't mind. In the dark blanket pulled over his vision, his inexplicable discontent with life disintegrates. He feels painless. In this state of deathconsciousness – the fleeting sense of the ground beneath him while his lungs reject air – he experiences true darkness.

-----

I step out of the dark interior of my 2005 Ford Mustang, shocked. I don’t know if the man actually flew through the air, or if I was just too high to see correctly. Either way, I know I messed up. “Hey! Are you okay!?” No response. Crap. There’s no one around. I wobble towards his crumpled body, or I guess in the worse case scenario, a corpse on the ground. I don’t know which it will be until I grab his wrist to check his pulse. 

He’s gone.

I’m too far gone to care, but I sober up enough to realize that with the end of his life, my life is going to end as well. Why couldn’t it have been a stray deer in the city streets instead of a human being? Everything I have built after my rehabilitation, everything that I have worked my butt off for, everything in my world is going to disappear, just because of a single relapse.

I arrive at an alternative realization. My world isn’t going to disappear; I’m going to disappear from the world. With the bang of a wooden hammer, I’ll be enclosed in bars and walls for the rest of my life, or at least enough time to drain the slim remnants of life I have left within me. No way I can pull some Shawshank Redemption-esque escape either. But the world will continue on without me, nearly no different than it originally would’ve with me in it. 

I search his body for some of his belongings. I want to learn a little about him so I can feel worse about myself, because somehow that sounds reassuring. Everything near him is damp with blood. 

I find a light-weighted wallet and an old iPhone in his right jacket pocket, as well as a key and a balisong knife in his left. If he was alive, maybe he’d pull the knife out and kill me for crashing into him. I wouldn’t complain.

His wallet was light. There wasn’t much in it – just two twenty dollar bills, a receipt from the grocery market, a library card, a few coins, and a couple condoms. Maybe I killed someone’s date tonight. There’s also a picture of a three-person family. Did I just ruin that? Ah, he was probably cheating anyway. How ironic. My frigid hands shakingly tear out his face. They’re so numb that I can’t feel anything, so I barely manage to rip out every piece of him. Just a mother and a young daughter left now. How ironic indeed. I hope this single mother raises this kid better than my mother raised me.

I get back into my car. I don’t need a jury, I already know what my sentence is. I’ll do what needs to be done myself.

-----

Sarah found out that Roger, her ex-fiance, died two days ago. The remnants of his car, a Ford Mustang 2005 that he’d spent a long time saving up for, contained his dead body at the bottom of a cliff. It was rumored that he accidentally crashed into and killed someone, so in an act of repentance, cowardice, or both, he drove off the mountain.

Although they’d recently broken up, Roger didn’t have anyone close to him – his mother had passed away years ago, around when they first met – so Sarah got all of his possessions. It wasn’t much. Just 4 thousand dollars, 2 thousand less than two days ago, remained in his bank account. A few of his on-person possessions were also recovered. 

Sarah walked around the house until she reached the only bedroom, which just barely managed to fit a queen sized bed. Seconds later, she found that the back of her head was buried in her pillows, and that she was staring intently at the LED lights on the ceiling that Roger had installed. Everything about this house drove her crazy; there were so many memories of Roger at every room, wall, and crevice that she had to move out soon.

She initially met Roger in rehab, and he had it even worse than she did. Perhaps she shouldn’t have broken up with him. Or maybe she should’ve eased it in better. Then again, Roger did cheat on her, even if he wasn’t sober when that happened. What should she have done? What could she have done? Her heart was broken.

She couldn’t even cry anymore, so she rolled over and opened the bedside drawer, where nothing but a picture remained. That drawer, like the rest of the house, used to be filled with Roger’s stuff. She got up and grabbed scissors from her desk in the living room, and cut up one half of the picture, then the other, until nothing remained except for flakes of tiny paper stuck in the fake fur of her cheap carpet.

She wanted to remove herself from all her pain. She unlocked her phone and dialed in a number from years ago that she still remembered all too well… after all, she now had 4 thousand dollars, the irrational yet inescapable guilt of a death, and nothing to live for anymore. She was ready to throw herself into the abyss of pills and needles once again.

-----

A text arrives. It’s an awful one. It’s about your daughter Sarah. She’s at the hospital right now; she overdosed. You’ve always feared that this would happen again, though that fear had somewhat subsided over the past few years during her sobriety. Or ostensible sobriety, because now you don’t know what the truth is. You can’t trust anything she says.

It hurts so much. It’s painful to lose your child over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again to drugs.

Is there anything worse than seeing your baby – whose diapers you changed while listening to babbles – in such a sorry state? Hollow. That’s what it makes you feel. Worthless. Your life, everything that you have done to raise this child, it has been worthless. You consider the mistakes that you made. Were you too strict? Were you too lenient? Should you have stopped her earlier, before she made friends with awful people? Would it have been better if you held back your tears all those nights when she came back home high and yelled at her instead?

Another text arrives. She’s alive. Just barely.

Does it matter though? Now she has lost everything: her house, her job, her savings, her friends, her fiance, and the most precious thing of all, her sobriety. The only thing she has left is her family, and her family, especially you, hates her just as much as they love her. She has wrecked her life, somehow yet again. You wish that you didn’t hold onto your hope when she came back from rehab promising that she was done. She’d already used all of her chances. You wish she was dead.

-----

A boy plays in the yard with a ball, with his dog. The ball goes a bit too far left. He chases it. It landed next to a window of a house. The boy sees Daddy and Gramps talking. Gramps is crying. Daddy has his glasses off, and his face in his hands. The boy doesn’t understand why are they so sad. Daddy why don’t you play catch with me anymore? How come Gramps’ face is wet when his skin is always wrinkly and dry?

He runs around the corner and enters the house. He can’t smell Auntie Sarah’s cookies for some reason, even though she promised she’d make them. He runs up to the second floor, where Auntie Sarah is supposed to be. But she’s not at her reading seat. Back down to the first floor, to her room. The door is closed for some reason. The boy knocks three times, then opens it. There she is! But she’s on the ground, not breathing anymore. He stares at her. She has scary needles scattered around her like the ones the doctor uses on him during his checkups, but no band-aids to cover the holes in and wounds on her body. He hears his father’s footsteps behind him. He is lifted into the air and bribed with some television time. He hears loud sirens coming closer. Daddy, Auntie Sarah is hurt, he says. I know, Daddy says, I know.