Four days. It has been four days since you were pronounced dead at the scene. Four days since the paramedics clocked your passing like just another entry on a time sheet. Four days since I’ve eaten, since I’ve left my apartment, since I’ve been able to meet my own eyes in the mirror.

When I do sleep, I dream of your ruined face. You stare up at me from only one eye since the other has been squashed like a grape. A watery groan erupts from your crushed throat, and in that gurgling you pour out your pain, your disbelief, your accusations. You tell me how you’d led a good life, how you’d done everything right. You explain that you still had plans and dreams and ambitions that now you would never meet. You scream at me that you, of all people, did not deserve what I had done to you.

Most of all, you tell me you never thought you’d go out this way, lying in a gutter in the pouring rain, your face blanched by the headlights of my car.