Standing in the Rain

I am standing in the driving rain, waiting for a taxi that will probably never come. That’s what she said to me over the phone on the night she died and I ceased living. I am standing here, she said, soaked to the bone and wishing I was back home. With you.

And I remember the sound of her voice, frustrated, high-pitched and twitchy. I had never heard her quite like that before, and I knew it then. I knew she wouldn’t last the night, and I knew I had to save her, to be her knight in startlingly shallow armor.

I don’t know why I came here in the first place, she told me in a strangled voice. I could hear the sound of the little thunderous feet pounding in the background, the music of the rain slamming into the ground upon which she stood.

And she was never my wife, the woman who stood there in a place she never should have been, waiting for that taxi that would never come. She wasn’t even my girlfriend, that red-haired temptress with a penchant for being dramatically salacious. I loved her for it, both then and later, even when I hated her too for leaving me.

I just can’t take it anymore. The fights, the arguments, the torturous pain of being around you for more than a few moments, she said to me on that fateful night. I want to be home with you, she repeated, so that we can talk it out, so we can put this thing to rest. It’s time. And I began to sob then, huge, wracking sobs that shook my entire body from head to foot.

There was silence on her end, then the sound of squealing brakes. Then nothing.

Sam