When I Die

I was speeding. I shouldn't have been, I know. Kids, other people on the road, drunk drivers, but I was.
So what.
What's done is done.
Drop it.
Driving is a responsibility. Isn't that what they tell you in driver's ed? A responsibility. But it's not a responsibility like cleaning your room, or doing your homework, or feeding your dog. You're not required to drive. The implication is that when you drive, as you inevitably will, you are to drive responsibly, ie in the way that you take care to feed your dog so nothing bad happens to him. Drive like that. Don't speed.

When I was young, my best friend's grandfather died. Cancer or old age or something. Something that old people generally die of but young people are, for some reason, exempt from. Probably cancer. Anyways, he died, and my friend was sort torn up about it. And so was I really, I mean, I didn't know anything about death. All either of us really knew at that point was that now, his grandpa wouldn't tell us stories about fighting Germans anymore. We would never hear that gravelly, old voice of his as he yelled at his wife to “get us growin' boys some cookies,” never see his San Andreas fault like eyes wink at us when the tray came out.
He would tell us the same story over and over, but it never got old. The blood was still fresh every time he told us. His smell of old and tobacco attacked your senses like the western front, and you were assaulted by his very presence.
And then he died. Not in a war, like he should've, not living the life he always talked about living, but in a chair, his head tilted back. No agony, no destruction to speak of, just a slow and silent fade from life, and he was gone forever.

The freeway this time of night has nobody on it for miles and miles, it's just you and the road and the occasional clump of yellow trash cans filled with sand to keep you from crashing into the concrete support for an overpass. When I was a kid, I used to think that those were for putting your trash in on long road trips. I thought, “Gee, people must get a lot of trash out here on the road,” and that's what I thought till I got arrested for trying to put trash in one. Well, interrogated. Serves me right for being an American after 9/11.
“Were you puttin' a bomb in there?”
“No. I was putting a bag formerly containing Sun Chips in there.”
“You know those aren't trash cans.”
“I do now.”
“Terrorists want to blow up our bridges while we're drivin' over 'em.'”
“Why?”
“Take away our sense a' security. Obviously.”
Serves me right. I should've just littered.

At the funeral, I watched my friend in the front row, and God did I feel sorry for him. He sat there, staring in horror at his dead grandfather crammed into a box three feet in front of him. You could see the loose skin pulling back on his face from lying down so long, the liver spots like cancerous potholes infesting his face, his mouth slightly contorted since they had to wire it shut. But the family wanted a pretty corpse for the funeral, not some dead old man with his mouth wide open revealing his already partially rotted tongue (I read that in a book, somewhere). You could even see that the funeral guys had used blush on the man.
Poor guy. You fight in a war. You kill a German with your bare hands to stay alive so you can see your high school sweetheart again and raise a family. Then you die and some funeral home director puts powder on your face because your family is disgusted by your pale, oblong, and cold visage. They put glass marbles in your eyes so it looks like you still have them. They wire your jaw shut so you look serene, like it's your greatest joy in life to be packed into a box and shipped one-way to heaven. Or hell if the Germans were right. And your dead, for all eternity, with make up on your face.
I saw it. My friend saw it, too. We cried because we knew him and we knew that's not what he would have wanted. And when we asked our parents about it, all they did was wipe the tears from our faces and say, “one day, you guys will have to learn how to deal with death.”

Street lights fly by and my interior flickers like a heartbeat. The lines on the highway pass in a blur of white and pink highway light.
In the car, driving 126 miles an hour, the lines look like their only a couple feet long. But I know that every one is actually more like 12 to 14 feet long. Nothing is as it seems, and especially not at this speed.
I knew the offramp was coming pretty fast, but I decided this time, I'd see if the yellow signs were necessary or whether they were just warnings.
45 mph. Let's try 130. Just a little more gas.

I went outside to feed my dog, Charlie, the next morning, and I sat there and watched him eat for a good half hour, until he was done. And I went and got my friend. He wiped the sleep out of his eyes, after all it was only about 8 o' clock on a Saturday morning. I always was an early bird.
He got dressed and came out to play and we went to my backyard to play with Charlie.
He had caught a bird and was shaking it like it was one of his chew toys. We went up to him to make sure he was ok, because there were feathers flying everywhere and you couldn't make out what was going on. He was moving like a blur. And I'll never forget that first time he snapped at me.
He was just doing it to keep me away from the bird, but he got my hand and I started bleeding a little so I kicked him in the side. He dropped the bird immediately and ran into the corner, whimpering like I had stabbed him. We looked at each other from across the yard, me nursing my bloody hand, and him with a look of terror and confusion plastered on his face. My friend didn't say a word. I got up and went inside.

The first thing that happened when I hit the barrier was the radio stopped playing. Replaced by glass shattering, metal striking cement, and then I must have gone slightly deaf because the sound afterward was all very subdued. I had no control of where my body was going, forward, backward, side-to-side, and I could taste blood everywhere. It was like my skin had taste buds and I just knew that my blood was all over me. I knew that in some time and place not where I was right then, my car was still moving, but I was in a river of inertia. I was the center of the universe.

I came back out with a knife, my friend confused and scared, my dog the same way.
I grabbed his collar and I stabbed him in the side, over and over again. And every time I pulled the knife out and shoved it back in, there was less resistance than before. It got easier and easier until all the red, red blood and guts had spilled out on the green, green grass and I was covered in it and all I was doing anymore was stabbing an empty skin. Stabbing what used to be my best friend.
That's when my dad came outside.

I could feel the car stop moving like it was a part of my body, like I was watching my hand become paralyzed. The seatbelt was wrenched around my neck. Glass was everywhere. I had no idea if my car even resembled a car anymore, or if I resembled a human. I couldn't move, nor did I particularly want to. The only thing I was certain of was that a fire was growing somewhere around me as the light flickered in my interior like a heartbeat.
This is how I wanted to go: in a burst of flame and glory. A shot of violence then it's off to the afterlife. And as the flames climbed inexorably toward the gas tank, I thought, “Serves me right. At least they won't put make up on my face.”

When we buried my dog in the backyard, I had never seen my dad cry so hard. And I had never been so confused about life and death.