Before you, I could sleep through the night, there was no waking with a cold sweat at every single sound.
Before you, I didn’t always look over my shoulder, paranoid and scared who of may be walking behind me.
Before you, I was happy, carefree, just a regular young woman. I wasn’t perfect, but I wasn’t bad, either.
I made mistakes, just like everyone else.
What 25 year old doesn’t?
But making the mistake of meeting you, by our paths simply crossing.. Well, that didn’t need to really change the whole rest of my life, did it?
I told myself it didn’t. I justified what I had done, and what I was about to do.
I worked through the night, and I did what I could. Cleaned up what I could.
The hole was messy to dig, and it took so long, out there in the dark, my phone in one hand being used as a torch whole I shoveled dirt with the other.
Getting the blood from the numberplate took some scrubbing, and yeah, replacing the front end would’ve been easier, but it would’ve drawn questions I just couldn’t answer.
And despite everything, despite the fact I had accidently killed someone..life just seemed to.. Go on.
I went with the motions, pretending I was normal, smiling at my Co workers, attending my regular Sunday roast dinners with my family. Outside, I was just regular me, but inside I was screaming.
Every time headlights flashed I waited to see cops, my breath baited.
But they never came. No one did.
I looked for your missing persons case online but there wasn’t one. There was nothing.
I’d glanced in your wallet before I buried you, your smiling face on your ID showing me the man you were underneath the damage I had caused to you.
I knew your name, your address.
I repeated them over and over, out loud every night as I laid restless in bed, haunted by your absent presence.
I tried to keep busy, and do good things. I volunteered at an animal shelter, I knitted beanies and donated them to the hospital for premature babies. I wanted to help, to do something good in the world, for the bad I’d caused.
But no matter what I did, I saw your mangled body whenever my eyes closed, I heard my tires screech, the sound of your body connecting with the ground replayed over in my head.
When the guilt got too much, I drove to your house.
I sat in my car, the engine turned off, trying to find the courage to go inside.
Instead I waited for a while, I watched your wife prepare dinner through the window, seemingly blissful and totally unaware of the horror I was about to rain down on her.
After a while I gathered my strength, and got out of the car.
I was ready to knock on that door and turn myself in, tell her what happened to her husband.
I knew she would call the police. And I was ready. I couldn’t live with this guilt a moment longer. It was eating me up, swallowing me whole.
And then you came out, and sat at the dinner table, wearing that same crinkled smile I so vividly remembered from your driver’s license.
Goosebumps filled my arms, my heart hammering in my chest, as I quickly got back into my car and drove off.
Now I’m here, home again, sipping on a mug of tea that’s long gone cold, and really, I’m feeling quite uneasy.
I can see the small mound of freshly overturned dirt from where I sit, and my thoughts are consuming me, the most palpable and ones I cannot fathom finding the answers to.
I wonder exactly who I had ran over, and buried in my backyard?