Death's Taxi

There was a grating discomfort in all of this. She had never been good at being a back seat passenger. The dynamic was all wrong. Her introduction to this woeful place in the car hierarchy had taken place early in her life. Sitting with a view of the backs of her parent’s heads. There was rejection in this positioning. A cold ignorance that made her want to be elsewhere. 

Right now, she’d rather be anywhere other than here, but the conveyor belt of life compelled her to be exactly where she was, and there was no arguing with it. As a child, her only viable alternative had been to pull the door handle open when the car was stopped in traffic and to run away. To run and run until there was no car and no unfeeling parents who had chosen to turn their backs on her and ignore her in favour of a journey she really was not sure she wanted to undertake.

This was much the same. She was under an obligation and were she not to fulfil it, there would be awkward and unwarranted repercussions which went against the grain of her current plight. She wondered whether braver souls than her had refused. Standing firm in a lack of acceptance of the awful reality of the situation. Turning their backs in defiance at the ridiculousness of a ritual that made absolutely no sense to her. All of this only made it worse.

To comply was to accept, and although she could not do that, she climbed into the back of the car in a stony faced denial of what this all meant. She was here under sufferance. She did not want this. Not the car, and certainly not the suffering. This was about as unfair as it ever got. She was annoyed and quite frankly, she felt cheated.

Worse still, she felt betrayed as those around her went along with the whole charade. But then, it was all very well for them. They didn’t have anywhere near as much skin in the game. She was the high-roller. This was everything to her. She’d rolled the dice of life and it turned out there was a face on this particular dice with a big fat zero on it, and in the centre of that zero was a void that took everything from you. Everything was so much more than a person could ever comprehend. 

As a child, she was a bundle of clashing uncertainty during the back seat journey. Her parents may have told her that they were going on holiday but this was an amorphous concept. They spoke with such conviction, but never once stopped to think about how their words landed. She had very little to bring to bear and all she could do was trust these two goliaths. But how could she trust the displaced backs of seats and the turgid silence that befell them as they embarked on a mystery journey on the road to nowhere. 

She remembered the loneliness of the sometimes red hot vinyl bench seat that translated into an intrusive boredom. Her questions were batted away like bothersome flies. This only made her feel less wanted. Less substantial. Less there.

That was how she felt now. Ever so small. The best of her was not here and this wasn’t happening. Home was where she wanted to be, but that was never going to happen. Home was where the heart was. Back when she was a little girl, home was where her mother and father were. But not in the car. Never in the car. At best, the car was a temporary conveyance. Sometimes, it was a rolling cage and she wondered what she’d done so wrong that she was being dragged away in a prison-on-wheels to who knew where.

As the car gently moved forwards she felt a building nausea caused by the vertigo of the situation. There was a hole in her life now, and she stood at the very edge of it. She needn’t look down at the hole to understand its nature. She felt its pull regardless of where her eyes rested. This was an endless chasm and it called to her. Taunted her. And the worst of it was that she would be denied its embrace. This was her lot. To be held in the gravity of a darkness that would ultimately shun her. Hers was a state of eternal limbo. Rejected by the world in her newfound state, but kept in place without the prospect of movement, let alone escape. An almost forgotten and disregarded museum exhibit for people to touch and prod from time to time before moving on to better and brighter exhibits.

Her vision was taken up with the back of the front passenger seat. Old habits died hard. She could have looked out of the side window, but that was not fitting. Not right now. Not when there was nothing there for her. She could also have lent to her right and craned her neck around to see the car in front. Taken in the surreal sight of what lay ahead. A collapsed future that left her with an unanswerable question.

There were no answers. That which lay ahead was not real. There was nothing of worth ahead. Not anymore. There was only the past. That was all she had now. He’d been the bridge to her future and now they were going to burn him. They were going to gather together. Say words and sing. Then they would play his favourite song, their favourite song, and torch her world as she passively watched on. There would be no warmth in those flames that performed the final act in the destruction of her life.

She wanted to grieve, but there was a numbness to her that precluded this. She knew what was expected of her. She could cry. She could even weep and wail, and they would tolerate the drama that she brought to the proceedings. Beyond that, she knew she would be on her own. No one would want to stick around to watch what it was that she became. Grief was a private, chrysalis state that everyone left well alone. They were only ever in it for the butterflies.

And that was what was numbing her. The inevitable but unwanted change. A curbing of her selfish desire to grieve herself. Her life was in that coffin. All that she was lay in that dark, confined space. Her life was gone and she no longer knew who she was, let alone what she was going to do. How could she? She no longer had any referent points. No idea. No one to talk to and to share her fears, doubts, hopes and dreams with anymore. He’d taken them all with him and she hadn’t even made copies. Trusted him so completely that she’d never expected him to die. Not before her. That was not in their script. He was the strong one. He was so full of life. The battery that powered her. Now she was at 1%. But she’d never have the release of complete dissipation. Her sleep mode was already on the blink. She’d limp along in a dull and lethargic state with no reserves of energy to ever lift her from the grey fog she’d drifted down into. Grief she now understood, was the thief of energy. A slowing down of time when all she wanted was to fast forward to the end.

The day he died, the music stopped. Her mind was now filled with white noise and she was paralysed by it. They had danced together and their lives had worked so well in the harmony they shared. She could not remember what it was she was supposed to do anymore. Not without her dance partner. Not without the music. And so she just sat there and awaited the full force of a grief that would not come, when all it was, was she didn’t have him there to love anymore. She’d never stop loving him, but she didn’t know what to do with her love now that he wasn’t there to readily accept everything she had and everything that she was. 

In time, she’d find a way to live that love again, but the reality of that eventuality eluded her. Now though, she allowed the cold, unfeeling walls of the car to close in on her and as she shrank into the stark and harsh commencement of her grief she wondered, are we there yet?