The Night

It was dark. The darkness was so profound that it appeared as if nothing had ever existed. I wondered how late it was. I had twisted and turned in my bed all night and yet was unable to conjure a drop of sleep. Although, it wasn't the first time that I hadn't been able to sleep. It had been that way for quite some time, in fact, since that night. 

 

“Get it off your mind!”, I said to myself.

Despite having little hope of sleep, I closed my eyes again. The night was calm. The continuous drizzle was all that could be heard. It was accompanied by a cold soothing breeze which blew in through the open window. For a while, everything seemed peaceful.

However, the tranquility didn't last. Gradually, the sound of the incessant drizzle turned annoying. The whispers of the wind kept getting louder. With each passing second the ticking clock seemed more unbearable. I felt uncomfortably warm. Droplets of perspiration appeared on my eyebrows. My breath grew heavier. My heart pounded like a drum. I sprang up - shivering and drenched in sweat - gasping for breath. In the darkness of my closed eyelids I could see the tinge of blood - precisely as red as I had seen on that fateful night.

“I have to stop thinking about that, it’s all in the past”, I thought to myself.

I looked out of the window - the drizzle got heavier, just as it was on the night of that miserable incident. The breeze had also turned considerably stronger. It carried an unusual smell - one which was instilled in my mind since that night. I stared blankly at the  flickering yellow gleam from the broken streetlight. It reminded me of the blinking traffic light on the road where it all happened. All of it echoed an uncanny resemblance to that night.

“Stop thinking! Forget about it all!”, I tried to persuade myself.

But I couldn't, however much I tried. How could I? It wasn't possible to forget an experience so horrifying. The events of that night were indelibly marked on my mind. I recalled exactly how the car screeched and swerved on hitting the brakes but it didn’t stop; how it jerked as it ran over the body. I was completely frozen all the while, unable to move a muscle. Before my eyes closed, the glimpse of the spilled blood got imprinted on my memory, forever.

I was appalled by how the very road on which my life was utterly transformed, wasn't affected in the slightest. Nothing about it had changed and everything went on routinely. Even the traffic lights were blinking the same way as they had been on that fateful night when the unceasing rain was washing away the trickling blood from my crushed body, lying lifeless on the lonely wet road.