I don’t know if this is the right thing to do.

There is still so much that I don’t know. That wasn’t a surprise. I had always been preparing myself for that possibility. I had watched him for years, but watching is something entirely different from living. I had tried to temper my expectations, leave room for mistakes and blunders. It wasn’t just that I had miscalculated. It was like I had been preparing my whole life to run, and then was tossed into the water and told to swim.

Things were easier to define before I was at the controls. There was a level of certainty that came to me as the observer. My choices weren’t just my own, they could always remain the right choices. Now, there was static.

It was the drone of everything, each what-if adding its unique frequency the growing din. One choice would cause a split, more possibilities, more decisions, more chances of failure. The buzzing grows exponentially. It’s a ghostly specter moving through my mind, running its hands over beliefs that I hold with certainty. It infects those certainties, causing them to decay.

I’d felt the wind, felt the howling as it filled the car. It was cold and bracing, and I was forced to close the windows, allowing feeling back into my fingers. The silence was so immediate, it felt like a violation. Then I wondered what I would say to her. What could I say? It was getting louder, the buzzing in my head.

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What do you say to someone that you hurt over and over again? Promises came to mind, that I would always love her, that I had always wanted a life with her, but they sounded hollow now. I see her waiting by the river, and it’s all that I think about when I hear myself promising to never hurt her again. That was easier to say when I had only been the observer. Now I knew what I was capable of.

And then I was swerving off the road. After working as long as I did to get here, I nearly killed myself a week in. It’s cold, but I can’t bring myself to get back into that car. I felt the walls closing in, while my only path of escape began to narrow and stretch. I wanted to move, to run faster towards Clara, but I was stuck on this stretch of road, untethered from the civilized world.

Maybe it’s a punishment, forcing myself wait for the tow truck out in the cold. I wanted to wake up. I’d felt it earlier on. The joy of being alive, of having freedom. I wanted to wake up from this place I had slipped into. One where my freedom was choked out by doubt and fear.

All I accomplished was my body shaking violently when the headlights came creeping out of the gloom and the tow truck had arrived.