Interlude

And then there were none.
The birds had stopped singing and the smell of the roses outside my window had ceased to stir the emotions that were once burning inside my heart. Last week, Roseanna left me. She left this world. Escorted to the other side by two tons of American steel spearheaded into the passenger side door of her 2001 Toyota Camry by a sixty-five year old steel worker who had one too many after work beverages. She was on her way home. She was on her way to see me.
I was in bed, sick, and she had just come off the night shift at the hospital. She called me on my cell to see how I was feeling. She was always so considerate. She insisted that she stop and pick up some medicine for me, against all my objections and assurances that I was fine and this was only a temporary bug. She wouldn't take no for an answer. Stubborn. So, on her way from Wal-green's with NyQuil, aspirin and microwavable chicken soup, two blocks away from my apartment that steel worker in the pickup ran the red light. I could hear the crash through my window. It sounded like the world was coming to a horrifying, screeching destructive end and, I guess in a way, it was.
The police showed up. They dragged the old steel worker from his truck, barely a scratch on him. They handcuffed him and they placed him in the back of one of the waiting cruisers to be taken to the precinct and processed. Left in a cell overnight to sleep it off and then to be told in the morning that he was a murderer. Then they pryed Roseanna out of the driver's side of the car. The car that could scarcely be called a car any longer. They put her on a stretcher. They lifted her into the back of the ambulance and they drove her to the same hospital she had just come from.
All I could do was watch. Watch from my bed as the woman I loved was taken from me that night. As she was taken from me forever. Unable to move. Unable to think. Unable to cry.
Still, here I sit. In this same room, at this same window. Waiting for her to show up at my door.
Everything is going to be ok.