Freefall ✓

23 | fault

"See? It's no big deal," she chirped, content and airy.

"Don't go so fast," I couldn't hold back the disquiet in my tone. "Why don't you just get the license?"

"Uhhhhh. . . it's one of those things you constantly plan on doing but never really get to it, you know what I mean?" She turned her head at me directly, her attention totally slipping from the road.

I glanced forward. My pulse leaped.

"Watch out!" I yelled, grabbing hold of the wheel desperately and pulling us to the roadside. The heavy sound of our breathing filled the car.

It had been a cyclist. Or more like a suicidal madman. Sure, the streets were empty but that didn't mean he had to cycle through the middle of the road, like he freaking owned it. I caught a glimpse of him waving an apologetic hand at us as he disappeared in the rearview mirror, just like that. 

For him, it was that easy.

For me, it wasn't. 

My heart hammered into my ribcage turbulently—desperate to spring out of it. With shaky hands, I threw myself out of the car. I sank to my knees and collapsed right there, on the grassy road verge, leaning against some tree trunk. My legs felt weak and unstable. My breath was rapid and irregular. My head was spinning, this nauseating dizziness building up inside of me. I felt my throat clogging up, my eyes burning.

No. Please not this again.

I was out of control. I couldn't calm myself down. I tried to breathe, to just breathe, slowly and deeply, like all of those blasted therapists had told me to in the past. I gasped for it.

Breathe. Come on!!! Breathe, you idiot!

It wasn't working. No matter how hard I tried, no air would make it through my untraversable windpipe.

I clenched my eyes shut. It was a deja vu. The memory flashed into my mind in pieces— in shards. In broken, sharp shards of glass that jabbed mercilessly right into my heart, in turn. 

My mother's solid but loving tone of voice was one of those stinging pieces. The flaring auburn of her hair another. The rest poured uncontrollably: The thunderous crash. The pain of the impact. The warmness of blood trickling down my icy skin. The feeling of panic and fear grinding at my guts. The blaring sirens, the blinding white of the hospital walls, the bleeping of the life support machine, the way it got more and more irregular until. . .

It was cascading back at me all over again, like an avalanche. That crushing feeling of remorse. Of guilt.

It was a drunk driver that hit us. Not my fault, the therapists would insist again and again. Not my fault at all.

But it was my fault. I knew it.

If my whiny twelve-year-old self wouldn't have been arguing with her over a stupid field trip she wasn't allowing me to go to, she would've been more alert towards the traffic. Maybe even alert enough to have spotted a drunk driver. And to have reacted.

"It was my fault," I noticed my mouth render over and over, my head shaking feverishly.

It could have been an hour that passed, or maybe a single minute when I finally heard someone from the outside world. A world that seemed so distant to me right then.

There were two hands shaking my shoulders. Two small hands. I opened my eyes.

Audrey was kneeling before me. She was blurry. Too blurry. I blinked a few times. Better.