Last Moments

Last Moments
By: Traci Ann
They say that just before you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes. I guess they’re right. Right now, as I lie on the ground, listening to the sirens and the people shouting.

I hear someone saying I’m not going to make it. I can see someone above me, shining some sort of penlight in my eyes. I don’t blink. My whole body was hurting a few moments before, but now I seem to have moved passed it.

I can’t understand why so many people are here, why so many flashing lights are all around. Then, I see it in my mind. The memory of what happened. The rain, the wet road, the headlights in front of me. I swerved to avoid the car, but it didn’t work, we collided. I went through the windshield.

What about the person or people in the other car? Are they alright? Did they get as badly hurt as I did? I don’t hear anyone talking about the people in the other car. How can that be? Aren’t they important, too?

I try to move again, but I can’t. It isn’t that it hurts too much, because I don’t feel pain anymore. I just…can’t seem to make my brain give the command to move even just my little finger.

I’ve stopped crying. I think about my parents. They’re at home, probably not even aware that anything bad has happened to me, yet. I wonder how they’ll react when they get the news. Will they cry? My mother will, I know it. She’s an emotional person. I wish I didn’t have to cause them so much pain.

I think about my girlfriend, she’ll be upset too. Of course she would, we’re engaged, she’s going to be crushed. I know she’ll want to be here with me, but she can’t be. I don’t want her here with me, to see me like this. I don’t want her to be with me in the afterlife until she’s lived a long and happy life. I don’t want her to die young like me.

I don’t feel it when they put me on the stretcher, shove a needle into my arm for the IV, but I see the movements of the people and know what they’re doing. The paramedics are trying to save my life, even though they know it’s useless. They don’t like to see nineteen-year-olds die. Why would they?

They put an oxygen mask over my mouth and nose. Part of me wants to live forever, but the other part of me is resigned to my fate already. That part of me wants to die, wants to see what’s on the other side, if anything.

Slowly, the darkness slides in from the sides of my eyes and makes its way toward the middle…