Time to Regret

The drive home was torture. Having to sit there alone with nothing but the monotony of the highway to keep me company.

Time to think. Time to grieve. Time to regret. Cloud-obscured moonlight bathes the empty stretch of road in a silvery light as my headlight beams highlight the cascading droplets of rain. A distant rumble tells me that a storm is fast approaching the road. I hope that I don't get stuck on the side of the highway somewhere. I need a distraction and fast.

So much time to think. So much time to grieve. So much time to regret. I turn on the radio. No good, the cacophonous melodies shriek out in chorus to the death all around me. The pain of the singers is not my pain, regardless what Carole King has to say otherwise. It wasn't meant to be. Distractions aren't what's in store for me. The soft whirring of my air conditioner, now that's a sound more in tune with my mood. The deep hum, like passing ocean waves. Perhaps a long drive, and a short pier. I shake my head. Were I in such a mood there are plenty of strong old trees or thick jersey barriers that I could plow myself into. There was something that I had to do first.

Too much time to think. Too much time to grieve. Too much time to regret. Had I said everything that I needed to say? Had I done everything that I needed to do? Were the minutes of my life well-spent? Did I simply survive and forget to live? I run my hand through my hair as tears begin to flow over the falling rain. The silver had gone jet black and the tempest begins. Lightning sparks across the sky in jagged hooks. Tiny white fingers reaching out from beyond the world in which I wander aimlessly down a lonely stretch of highway.

Time to think. Time to grieve. Time to regret. I should feel something as I turn off the highway and begin down a winding road out into the woods. I should consider myself a failure as a husband and father. I should consider myself a complete waste of life. I should be thinking, grieving, regretting. But I feel nothing. The woods encircle me, seemingly without the conscious need to actually enter them. They appear as if from nowhere, silent guardians of my most terrible secret. That through tears shed from what was, I am now an empty vessel.

I open the trunk and remove the bodies. I begin to dig the hole. I keep trying to pretend that I don't hear the faint moving from the plastic covering them. I wish I could be sorry. No, I am sorry. I just wish that I could properly show it. I stack the bodies neatly in the hole and cover it with the earth I had just displaced. It will all be over soon. My failure will no longer harm anybody else. I continue my drive down the end of the lane where our cabin was. The place where we had once been so happy. I put the gun to my temple, hearing the clawing of the bodies that I had just buried at the window. It wasn't just them, but all the others. My cabin is surrounded by the scratching, clawing, howling, torment of the lives that I ended. I look into the eyes of my wife, now blood-red and filled with hatred. She welcomes me to the Hell that I have earned. This it it. My hand tightens on the grip, my index finger caressing the trigger. No more time to think. No more time to grieve. No more time to regret.