The Other Side

                                                                                                                                 

“I’m done here! I hate you all!” the words I spat with such fury now echoed against the trees, as if they were repeating the words in shock. Tears stream down my mother’s face as I slam the front door with frightening finality. I’m never coming home. Outlines of veins pound under my step father’s face as he screams mangled words at my back.

I walk down the steps to my pride and joy, a 1986 Pontiac Trans Am that I built up from a frame I found in a junkyard. I put in everything, from the motor to the black paint, which still had not a scratch on it. I sit in the driver’s seat and start the car. The engine purrs to life, and floor it down the long, twisted driveway. The tires wail as I turn right onto Jensen road. The thing I love about this road is that it’s the straightest road in this dead-end town, and the two cops in this town don’t think to patrol it. There are no speed limit signs, and no street lights.

It’s just me and my baby. I stand on the gas as I lean over and pop a CD in the player. Its The Doors greatest hits. Jim Morrison is belting out the beginning to “Break on Through to the Other Side” as I try to step on the gas just a little bit more. I glance down at the speedometer and see the needle hovering over 120 mph. Holy shit that’s fast. I ease off the accelerator and relax my hands from their death grip on the steering wheel. I didn’t even notice I had white knuckles.



Thoughts begin to flow, spurred by Jim Morrison’s poetry.

Try to run, try to hide. Break on through to the other side.



Couldn’t have put it any better myself. I try to run, to escape all people I’m forced to deal with. I try to hide, alone in my room with the music blaring to drown out the fighting downstairs; but, it’s clear that’s not working. So that leaves the only logical solution, to go to the other side. To die. I couldn’t actually do myself in, I’m too cowardly. But if I were to get into an “accident”, no one would have to know. No one would care anyways. Who’s gunna notice that the quiet kid in the back of the room is gone? Who’s gunna care? No one. Fuck it. I look farther down the street.

My headlights are the only ones cutting through the seemingly infinite darkness. I’m not shocked that only one of the maybe 200 people in this town are driving a dirt road on the outskirts of town at 11 o’clock at night.  Silhouettes of trees arc into a natural tunnel over the road, intensifying the darkness.  I pick one up the road and aim for it. I jerk my wheel to the left and stand on the gas. The music switches to the next song, ironically, “The End”. The light, sad guitar strums as I notice two cones of light cut into the dark on the horizon. I merge back into my lane. No sense in taking some other poor soul with me.



Jim’s voice cuts the guitar riff. The sadness inside of him is apparent with his morose delivery.

This is the end. My only friend, the end.



This is the only way I can escape. The only way I can get away from the hell that reality has become. Where did I go wrong? I’ve never done anything to bad. I mean, sure, I’ve done some things that aren’t exactly legal, but anything to fit in, right? Do I just crash and burn, or is there a place I go to after this?  I don’t even believe in God at this point. No “all loving” being would curse me with a dead father, an indifferent mother, an alcoholic Step dad and a little brother I had to basically raise myself. Not that I minded, Noah and I have always had the close bond of friendship, despite the 5 year age gap. They say siblings are always at each other’s throats, but that hasn’t been my experience. Even if it turns out he is real, I don’t wanna be trapped behind the pearly gates, forced into small talk with monks, beggars, and the asshole in charge up there.

I hope someone finds my note.  Maybe that will help them understand, it’s not them, it’s me. Ugh, I sicken myself. Did I really just say that? But it’s true. Sure, my life hasn’t helped my mental state, but it’s not to blame for my depression. I wonder who will go to my funeral… Noah will probably struggle with the fact that his big brother’s gone. Or maybe he won’t notice. I turn my lights off and allow the darkness to swallow up my car as I continue to cruise down the road.

I decide that now is the time to do it. I stomp the accelerator and jerk the wheel to the left. I feel the impact before I hear it. I’m thrown around my car, no seatbelt buckled to tie me down to my seat. I hear the scream of wounded metal as the car comes to an abrupt stop. I am thrown through the windshield and I fade to black. I awake to the sound of screaming. I get up, but my body stays in its bloody heap on the pavement. I continue to walk towards the screams, coming from a Toyota Camry that looks like a crushed soda can. I look in the gap that used to be the windshield and see a woman in the driver’s seat, a baby clutched to her chest. Her anguished tears mix with the blood on her face, and fall onto the child. She’s kissing its head over and over, as if in denial. I look in the child’s eyes and they stay fixated on the car ceiling behind me. They lack any life in them. What have I done? Had I known there was a car there…I need to call for help. I go back to my body and try to reach into my pocket to get my phone. Of course, not having any tangibility in this world, I can’t grip it. I look at my body. My eyes are a voided white, my face a landscape, with streams of blood running down every contour. My body is splayed in a heap, limbs bent and twisted at disgusting angles. Is this what I wanted? Is this what I dreamed about my entire life? What have I done? I decide to stay at the scene, not to help, but to observe how they clean up my mess.

I hear sirens in the distance. The ambulance screams down its path towards the crash, it’s flashing lights creating a mural of red, blue and yellow on the trees and houses dotting the road’s edge. The EMTs stop suddenly and survey the scene. They are yelling numbers into their radio, calling for backup I assume. Then the two paramedics jump from the ambulance and rush in different directions. One towards me, the other towards the crushed remains of the woman’s car. The man by my side checks vitals, and eventually comes to terms with the fact that I’m gone, no longer trapped within that shell.

He yells to his partner “We’re gunna need to bag and tag this one Bill.”

         Bill is peeling the metal door of the Camry off of the remainder of its hinges. He then pulls out the woman and her child, paying special attention to the heads and necks of both. He sees that the woman is alive and starts talking to her to keep her from going into shock.          

“What’s your name?” Bill asks in a gentle, disturbingly rehearsed voice.

         “Kath-Kath-Katherine. And this here is Julie. Julie’s nine and a half months. She’s already learning to walk and she” the woman rambles on about life before I ruined it, but Bill cuts her off.

“Ok Katherine, we’re going to bring you to the hospital, just to make sure you’re alright.

Could you tell me what happened?”

“I-I-I was driving home, and Julie was hungry, so I had leaned over the seat to grab her,

And when I looked back at the road, this idiot had swerved right into me. He must be drunk,

That’s the only way he could think it was ok-“

“Katherine, I’m afraid we can’t get a vital on your daughter. We need to get you in the ambulance, to get you to a hospital now.”



         Just then, two more EMTs pulled up. The woman was loaded into Bill’s ambulance, and my body was loaded into the truck that had just arrived. The baby accompanied me on my ride. I decided to go home, but instead of having to walk home, I just kind of…got there. I left the scene just as the responding officer arrived to survey the damage and cause.



I appear on the front steps of my old colonial. I look at its weathered shingles, at its peeling red trim. This hasn’t been re-done since dad died… that’s why the house looks decrepit; it hasn’t been maintained for five years. Five years…dad has been gone for five years. He wasn’t here to see me go to my first day of high school. Wasn’t there to see me start working for his landscaping company. He didn’t see Noah get on the bus for the first time. He wasn’t there to teach me how to shave, to play ball out front, all those things dad and son are supposed to do. Even when he was alive, he got home around 7:30 and was dog tired. He’d just flop on his chair, crack open a beer, and talk to us. I don’t think anyone has sat in that chair in years.  Mom used to sit there and stare at it, wondering when her husband would come home. I’m jarred from my memories as I feel a fist go through me and hear a loud knock at the door. I look back and see an officer behind me, solemn face bearing the bad news I already know too well.

         

My mother opens the door and begins to weep, already knowing what had happened.

“Ms.Rourke?  I’m afraid your son has been in an accident. He was in a two car collision

On Jensen, and I’m not sure the fatality count, but the damage didn’t look good at all. They were all rushed to fairway general hospital; we need you to go see if it was your son.”

Mom wipes the tears from her eyes and walks out of the doorway, grabbing the pen and pad of paper from the fridge, and jots a quick note explaining to my step dad and Noah where she is. She takes my sweatshirt off the couch, puts it on, and walks back to the door.

“Ms.Rourke, we’re very sorry for your loss. If you’re ready to go I could bring you in the cruiser.” My mother tries to reply, but can’t bring herself to form any words, and instead nods her head. So the 6 foot 3, probably 230 pound officer turns and trudges down the walkway, my 5 foot 1, 135 pound mother under his arm in a sweatshirt at least four sizes too big for her. It looked kind of funny; I might have even let loose a chuckle if the scene hadn’t been so heart breaking.

         I arrive at the hospital just as my mother does. Being accompanied by an officer, she is able to walk right by the check in desk. She walks, head down, right behind the officer, trusting he knows where to go. I see tears drop from her face onto the sterilized laminate floor, losing their shape on impact. We follow the officer through blank corridor after blank corridor, haunted by the smells of heavy cleaning supplies and human waste. The heavy silence is broken only by the beeps of countless monitors, and the heaving sobs of my mother. We finally arrive at the morgue, which looks like a big freezer door from the front. I remember going hand in hand with mom five years ago to make sure it was dad who had been in a terrible accident while landscaping. Of course it was dad, who else could it be?  And I see the same expression on her face that I saw five years ago, a look of saddened shock that broke my heart. The officer opens the door to the morgue and walks my mother to a pull out drawer. The officer asks if it’s her son, and she gives the slightest nod as she bursts into another fit of weeping. The officer escorts her out of the building gently. I had no idea she loved me so much, or at all for that matter. I’m overcome with a wave of regret. I decide to go home with her, try and console her, and console Noah, as they go through another mourning process, this one much less necessary then the last.



         Mom is laying in my bed, sheets over her, crying. Bawling her eyes out would be more accurate. She doesn’t move any of the things on the floor, trying to leave my room as untouched as possible. She finds an old music box that I got for my first birthday, stashed under t-shirts and socks, and pulls it out. She notices a note underneath it. The Note. She unfolds it and begins to read.



“Dear reader,

         I just need someone to talk to. It seems like I don’t have that luxury any more. Ever since dad died, I haven’t had anyone to talk to except for Noah, and as caring as he is, he doesn’t quite understand what’s going on. And it’s not like I can trust any friends in this town. It’s such a small town that any stories I relinquish would snowball into the talk of the town. So I guess it’s just the pen and paper again. Well, I feel empty lately. There’s heaviness in everything I do, as if depression weighed me down physically as well. I just don’t feel like I can go on this alone for much longer…”

Her tears blur the words and fall to the paper, and she sobs as she folds it back up and puts it in her pocket. She walks her fingers over the white crib, covered in a dusting of shamrocks, until she comes across the knob to start it. She twists it gently, and it starts to sing Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra (an Irish lullaby). A jolt goes up my spine as it starts to play.















Over in Killarney

Many years ago,

my mother sang a song to me

In tones so sweet and low.

Just a simple little ditty,

In her good old Irish way,

And l'd give the world if she could sing

That song to me this day.

"Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li,

Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, hush now, don't you cry!

Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li,

Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, that's an Irish lullaby."

Oft in dreams I wander

To that cot again,

I feel her arms a-huggin' me

As when she held me then.

And I hear her voice a -hummin'

To me as in days of yore,

When she used to rock me fast asleep

Outside the cabin door.





all lyrics used here are the property of their respective owners. they are not used with intent to infringe any copyrights.