• She found herself in a dead locked gaze with her past, rifling and rummaging through many bags and suitcases to obtain just the right attire to satisfy her before packing it away into her luggage with the rest of those vintage valuables that she decided to bring with her. It was going to be a long trip, to say the least, and with her luck there would be no one to talk to and no one to bring her back up if she began to grow anxious or nervous.

    There was something almost macabre about her as she stepped out of her room with the light glimmering off of dark locks and pale skin adorned with unnecessarily dark clothing that brought out the sheer pallor in her face. Lips were stained red with just a measly gloss and eyes were brightly procured with eye shadows, liners and mascara that she so often used to wear on trips like these. She was vaguely reminiscent about this day, the day of that funeral, though it wasn’t as though she particularly cared to partake in such a lucid event, but since she was invited and there happened to be free food then there was no reason for her to decline. Who would decline free food?

    The sound of footsteps reverberated from the floorboards as the soles of ravenous coloured boots tromped across the ground in her home, the woman making her way silently and without hesitation toward a small bureau where the keys to her obnoxiously non-spacious car were left, the steel sprawled out across the wooden surface before slender digits swiped them up, immediately they were shoved into the palm of her fist upon walking out the door. Usually the first thing one notices when walking out the door would be something much like the scenery -- the lawn, the road, the landscape, etc – thought the first thing that the woman noticed when she walked out the door was a small rodent lying dead underneath her car tire; how peculiar.

    It’s not as though a dead rat holds any meaning to her, but it was that grotesque look to the maimed creature that caused her to glance down so suddenly and without much shock. She peered around the tire and noticed a trivial amount of blood shed that stained the pavement underneath the car, she felt herself still in a state of macabre as she shied away from the rat behind the tire and popped her car door open to allow herself access to get in.

    The keys were immediately jammed into the ignition, the sound of their turning and the engine rumbling to a start were noisy and cacophonous, every kid in their yard turned to stare as the woman drove her petty, green car out of the driveway and down the road.

    Roadways and highways weren’t as lively as they would be normally, not a single car other than her own had been out and pedestrians were no where to be found as she sped mildly down the freeway. Rain began to pitter-patter down onto her windshield, though she didn’t bother to turn on her wipers and merely let the rain blur the road in front of her. What, in fact, did it matter if she turned them on or not? It’s not as though the rain was coming down hard enough to blur the entire road and rest of landscape out of vision for her.

    The radio flickered on as she leaned in to press the power button, a rather bad quality version of “Zombie” by The Cranberries resounding through her stereos as she pushed the toe of her boot firmly to the gas pedal, her speed shooting up from 35MPH to 65MPH within a matter of seconds. There were no cops to stop her, no cars to delay her and the woman knew there had to be something wrong, it was a growing intuition inside of her. All the rain, the funeral and this lucid state of mind sent her spiraling into a wrecking depression that there was no chance of bringing herself out of.

    “Meet me on the interstate.” Were the last words that she’d heard before they died, she’d never known what those words meant until this day, until the invitation for that funeral popped up miraculously on her door-step without warning, without her even knowing what had happened to begin with. They told her that there had been an accident, something involving a seg-way and all of its functions no longer working causing it to drive directly off a cliff, it sounded like such a bizarre way to die, but she couldn’t put it past him.

    The interstate just near the woman’s home was where they’d found his body, the poor man was mangled and severed from head to toe. A broken neck and a severed arm, whilst sustaining at least 9 broken bones due to the severity of the fall and the height from which he fell, it all seemed so surreal and like something you might hear as a bad joke on the topic of death. It was at this point the rain had begun to cease its menial trickles and pad down in large, dime-sized drops of water that blurred the view of the road completely.

    She still wouldn’t turn on those windshield wipers, still refused to acknowledge that it was raining as she pressed down onto the gas pedal a bit more, that 65MPH she’d been going was fleeting as it shot up to 95MPH, her hands moved reluctantly from the wheel and the car was sent tumbling down a rigid cliff where the guard rails had been broken, the rusted metal bars beside the broken ones tearing off easily as the woman plummeted to her conveniently timed death.

    The woman had died on the day of her best friend’s funeral, she vowed in a note that was left behind in a car that if he were to ever leave her that she would follow wherever he would go, either the friendship was strong enough or there was an unrequited love waiting to be re-kindled in the midst of death but the two of them will eventually not live to be forgotten.

    The funeral of the woman was a mere few days after that of the man, but their headstones were placed directly across from each other with flowers adorning the ghastly graves. She’d asked so politely in her note to have an engraving in both headstones, the one on her own being marked with the words “I finally met you.” While you can guess what the words engraved upon the other were, never again would two friends have to depart and never again would she suffer without the best man she’d ever known in her life.