“I’m so sick of this!” I grouse. I’m driving my car down a desert highway. It’s the dead of night. “My friends don’t get what it really means to be a man.”
A real man accepts challenges. He doesn’t let small-minded haters get him down. He always rises up to the occasion. If that means making things harder for himself for no reason, then so be it.
Like driving down highways at night. Easy peasy.
I think for a moment. What if I make this… harder?
I smirk and turn my headlights off. There. Now I can’t see.
No, still too easy. I start blasting my radio.
Is this the best I can do?! Come on!
I floor it. There! That’s the kick! Let’s see them deny I’m a man now!
I grin from ear to ear and start headbanging. “Tourner Dans Le Vide” fills my ears as I speed down the desert highway. Oh, hell yeah. Life’s good! I’m a man! I’m the manliest man that ever manned!
There’s only one small problem. My car has drifted from one side of the highway to the other.
And a truck is barreling towards me.
It lays on the horn. I panic, hit the brakes, try to swerve out of the way.
It’s no use. The truck hits me so hard, it drives on top of my car. My entire car is crushed.
And so am I.
...
His three friends arrived a few minutes later. Ambulances and fire trucks were everywhere, but nobody could get the boy out of the car. He was a teenager- barely in his senior year of high school. It was a shame that he was dying in such a way.
Even if they could have gotten him out before he died, it would have been no use. He was crushed beyond repair. All his bones were broken and his blood was all over the place.
The boy’s friends approached the car, shocked, and looked inside. The boy lay at the bottom. His skin had come off on impact. His glassy white eyes and blood red face stared senselessly at the roof of the car. One of his friends groaned, and another threw up.
The boy turned to them. The boy’s friends were taken aback. He reached towards them with a flayed hand and spoke in a raspy voice.
“Please,” he groaned. “Don’t die trying to prove you’re a man. It’s not worth it. Nothing is…”
And he was gone. His last few drops of blood leaked onto the car floor. His friends turned and walked away, unable to believe what they had seen. One hid his tears. Another stared at the ground.
...
All his life, the boy had wanted an open casket funeral. “To show the world that not even death could destroy my beauty,” he’d joked.
The casket was closed at his funeral.
But maybe he wouldn’t have complained.