Jim

All these things you notice going by. All the regrets you thought were bad when life was as it should be. You, having a job, breathing the air, grinning and drinking and hitting on the girls with short skirts and divine split-down-the-middle-sunrise smiles. The ones that maybe you'd have had the guts to ask out if you'd known this would happen tomorrow. This. All this at your feet. The bleeding, the loose grips (on your head, on other people, on being), the things you feel now are your knuckles twisted up in a knot from holding the fucking bat too hard. Clothes not fitting because you found them in a house—someone's dream house or the house they'd hope they wouldn't be stuck in for the rest of their lives (oh, how it turned out)—in their closets, on their floors, whipping from their laundry lines. They hang on to your shoulders and over your tired fingers like dead skins. You bunch them up in your fists, hard and tight, and try to breathe. Ash, rain, and rotting.

All the regrets. Never saying I love you enough. Never doing what you're told. Throwing it in that last year of school. Sleeping in late. Never seizing the day. Drinking the last of the milk, hating people who bicker, bodies pushing and shoving you as you walk down a street, into a pub. The day that car came across you, the minute, the very second—that was the end of it all. Rationality. Certainty. Future. You split your head on a curb, cracked melon, everything stolen from you in a white-wash, gone in a flash. As it comes back, sight and sound, you're rolling to your side, rolling to your torn up fingers, dumbfounded. Get... Get up. Go on. Get up. Get up. But you can't, and someone's screaming, screaming, and a horn's going off. Who for the love of God is screaming out there? Stop. Fuck, just stop, please. And you'd say it, you'd scream it, scrape out the gob of something stuck in your throat that's drooling out between your teeth in red threads (you've broken yourself, Jim), head heavy, but then you're back down again, and how that happened you don't know but there's the sky's staring at you, grey and blue and forever going. Your breath catches, you open your mouth to bring it back, faces now blurring the blue. You don't quite blink it away, you fall. Blank and fast. You don't dream where you're going.