• It is hard to believe winter is over already.
    It seemed, at the time, the dreary gray would last forever. I am still surprised to look outside to see the sun shining brilliantly as if our time together had not been real. I am ashamed to say that I do not remember your name. Although your face haunts me in my dreams, your lips move silently, I hear nothing. I try, please believe me, I try to remember it, so many nights I spend awake listing names that I might fit with your beautiful face but none seem right. They wither in die before you elegance. You were a fleeting beauty in this world, like a snowflake, beautiful but cold, gracefully falling to the world but only the slightest touch would destroy you. A fleeting light in the darkness that is my mind. It almost seems that you were nothing more than a dream.
    I have spent so much time worrying about it, no, about you. How are your parents? How is your little brother? How are your best friends? Did they know you were drinking at only sixteen? Had anyone done anything to try to stop you? If just one person, any person, had reached out to you, would you have told them about the scars? Or about how everyday seems like the last? Had one of your parents stopped you, would you have listened if they had told you not to go out? I doubt it. That was just your way, wasn’t it? Careless and ignorant like a child, did you think about them? When you decided it was time. Did you see the faces of your parents, your little brother, or even your best friend? Did you think about them when you swallowed that bottle of pills with that vodka? Or did you think about which family would be woken up in the middle of the night by a police officer telling them that their father or mother or sister or brother was dead? No. You didn’t.
    Would you have changed your mind if you had known the grief your discussions would have caused? I doubt it. But as those headlights rushed towards you did you have a moment when you realized that your life was not half as bad as you made it? That you had friends, a family that would grieve for you? Or did that thought ignite some emotion long buried in the back of your mind, a place like mine, that won’t allow me to remember your name? I have trouble remembering a lot of things lately, who I was, who I had been, I gotten lucky, that’s what the morticians had said, an inch to the left and I would have been a vegetable for the rest of my life. I had been there that night; I had seen your face, just before our cars collided. I wonder how you are doing, if you think about me often, while you sit in that hospital. If your mind ever drifts back to my face, do you wonder like me, who that silent screaming face is- was? Have you ever tried to place a name to me? I doubt it. The doctors say it is a slim chance you will remember anything from that night. But I can tell you now, fleeting beauty, it is a night I will always remember. I hope you get better in the spring; everything does, when this damned gray releases its hold on you. I hope you go home to your family and look each of them in the face, tell them how much you love them, how foolish you had been, because I will never get that chance again.

    I think I’ll call you Jane-Doe.