Why’d the Chicken Cross the Road?

The last time I saw her, really saw her, she was smiling at me from the porch as I was walking up with firewood I had cut that morning, having left before she had woken up. She was in the white dress I had bought her the day I proposed to her four years ago, it was a simple dress, but she made it more. She had a way with turning the simple things in life to things of wonder. Everyday she managed to take my breath away by just being. How i got so lucky I’ll never know, but maybe that’s why things happened the way they did, the universe gave me everything I had ever wanted. A place to belong, and someone to belong to.
She had a beautiful smile, radiant more like it, something that warmed me down to my soul. Something that makes my soul ache on the cold nights, and even the warm ones, when the knowledge of her truly being gone returns from its distant ventures to the back of my mind, reminding me how short life, and love, is. It’s plain, the feeling of loss. Heavy, but. Plain. It just happens, the hardest part is figuring out whether or not it actually happened, if it’s real or just some scenario you made up. Internally you’re reassuring yourself that when you go home she’ll be there, as she always is, with those old pink sleepers half off her feet as she’s curled on the couch reading a book about something that’s beyond your understanding, and not in a ditch struggling to take her last breath in the hard rain underneath a heavy car. That’s when everything sets in, when you’re alone, when the friends aren’t there to console you, when you’re alone. In the dark, in the bed you’d spend every night next to someone, where you could turn over and touch the only thing that ever really mattered.
That’s when the thoughts really kick in, that what ifs. The could be’s. The happy and the bad. There’s so much bad. You start to wonder about the last thing you said to her, whether or not she really felt how much you cared for her, or about how her last words to you, just as her first, was a forever unanswered question to such a lame joke. “ why did the chicken cross the road?” I smile about it sometimes, thinking back on the day in the college library where this shy girl came up to me attempting to start a conversation. I remember how much it took me by surprise, how I didn’t have an answer for her.
But now there’s nothing but shallow breath, and constant thought to that question.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

To die alone, in the rain.