The vast, empty road yawned out before him, an endless expanse of freedom and speed. In the utter blackness of the night, his headlights seemed almost to be spooling the asphalt out ahead of him. His hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, his foot pressed to the car floor with the gas pedal sandwiched between the two, Jason leaned his head back, his eyes closed in utter bliss. He reveled in the wind ripping through the car’s open windows, pulling at his clothes and tussling his hair as he shrieked down the seldom-followed desert road. Speed limits long forgotten, the only life his own and the only sound his car’s engine bellowing into the night. It was far from a luxury, the car. It was old, and cheap, the kind of model most people wouldn’t even be able to name, but Jason had lovingly gutted it and replaced the internals with the sort which could stand up to the speed in which he was currently indulging. In moments like these, though, as he pushed his work to its limits, as he tore greedily through road and open space as though it was endless, the world his own mobius strip and the car to traverse it, he could ignore.

He could ignore the cheap and shredded pleather lining every seat but his own, the makeup clattering in the glove compartment, and the purse wedged under the emergency brake. He could ignore the juice stains on the carpet by the back seats, a rainbow of comically oversized polka dots, and he could ignore the slimy, sticky, something that was smeared across the back seat in trails shaped by tiny fingers. Out here, his eyes closed, smelling the exhaust and feeling the wind and hearing the roar of the engine, he could be anything. He could be a stunt driver, working on a movie to delight millions. He could be behind the wheel of a racecar, an F1, basking in the cheers of an audience as he soared towards another trophy. Hell, a bank robber, even, making daring escape after daring escape, not to mention headline after headline. Out here, he could be anything, or anyone, that he was not.

Lost in these fantasies, he almost didn’t hear the horn. He did, however, hear it too late. His eyes snapped open and his body moved as though he were drowning in molasses. The bass of the horn shook through him as the 18-wheeler barreled closer. With an agonizing slowness he lifted his foot from the gas and moved to the brake. Desperately he willed his body to move faster, to do anything, as time seemed to crawl. But when the brake pedal finally began to depress the truck was upon him. Time still inched by, and it was as if he could feel every vibration, see every contortion, and hear every screech of metal on metal as the truck battered through his car. His car crumpled, crushed like disposed tinfoil, as the semi truck barely even slowed. For the briefest of moments, Jason wondered why his life wasn’t flashing before his eyes, like he’d heard it would. Then, his skull was crushed to a smear between the steering wheel and some jagged part of what had once been his car.

Jason flung forward, sitting up in bed so quickly it was as if the momentum from the crash still carried him. A scream erupted from his lips, sweat spattering his bedsheets from slick skin and soaked hair. For a few long and confused moments it was all he could do to sit in place, voraciously devouring air in ragged, frantic gasps. He slowly took in the room, dimly lit only by what few slices of light could pierce through the blinds on the windows. The room was familiar- his bedroom, which he left nearly an hour away on Friday nights to race down the desert roads alone. He staggered out of the bedroom, padding across the floor on bare feet towards the apartment proper. No sooner had he rounded the corner than his wife opened the door and stepped through. He glanced at her like a drowning sailor at a raft. “Hey.” She said, sympathetically. “You look like shit.” He braced himself on the table, stammering. “N. . .nightmare. W-where were you?” “Taking Triss to preschool.” She answered, though it came out more like a question. “It’s Saturday.” Jason said shakily. His wife clicked her tongue. “Babe, I wish. It’s Monday.” She slowly crossed the room before lounging in their bedroom door. “Must have been one hell of a nightmare, baby. Why don’t you come here and I’ll help you forget all about it.” Despite himself, Jason chuckled. “Suddenly I’m reminded of why we’re . . .” An almost unnoticeable pause. “Together.” Her sultry smirk turned to a teasing frown. “Pig.” She spat, and as she turned, she shouted “. . .and we’re married!”

It was so, so familiar. That blinding light, searing his eyes and yet still growing brighter every second, and utterly filling his field of view. That sound, a low, bassy drone, reverberating through his chest. Yet he couldn’t place it, even as he pressed himself to the walls of his cage, desperate for an escape yet unsure why. Then came that horrible stench of burnt rubber, and that ear-splitting squeal, and with it, clarity. As the truck once more crushed him and smeared him across the road he screamed. In a panic, he sat up, flinging himself from the bed before he even realized it was there. His scream felt as though it was ripping up his throat, slicing through his vocal chords as it scrabbled like an animal to be free. He hit the cold, hard floor and briefly convulsed before he lay still, splayed, his neck at an awkward angle. He screamed no more.

“You good, baby?” His wife’s voice. His eyes snapped open, a piece of toast hanging dumbly from his mouth. His wife stared quizzically from across the table as their daughter, sat between them, clumsily ate a bowl of sickly-sweet smelling cereal. Jason grimaced- he hated when his wife let her eat that sugary crap. He tried to speak, but succeeded only in sending his toast skittering across the kitchen table. His daughter giggled, and snatched it up. “Fine,” he lied, “just tired.” As he spoke he rose, and staggered to the bathroom, kicking the door shut behind him as he came to rest on the counter, one hand splayed on either side of the sink. As Jason stared into his own quivering eyes, his heart felt like ice in his chest. He splashed water into his face and left to call in sick to work yet again.

Air flooded his lungs in a single, massive breath. His eyes flew wildly around his bedroom, unseeing and frantic. He lay there, chest convulsing as though something were trying to burst out of it, as he tried to come to terms with consciousness yet again. More time had passed, he was sure of it now. It wasn’t just confusion, or illness, pieces of his life had vanished. The bedroom was familiar, but the familiarity was obscured by an alien finish: things out of place, belongings that were neither his nor his wife’s. New furniture, and frames on the wall, their details obscured in the dark. The dark Jason’s thoughts echoed as he finally came fully to awareness. Came to finally hear the dull, constant blare of a car’s horn assaulting his ears from outside his apartment. Half-aware, he pulled on slippers and slipped through the door, down the stairs to the street, where he came to a sudden stop, arms swinging limply at his sides.

The street was the scene of a tragedy. A car that he knew too well was split nearly in two across the flat, wide front of a 18-wheeler semi truck, its driver faring no better. Pieces of metal and man were scattered across the narrow city street. The scene was woefully out of place, seeming to occupy more space than was possible. Jason couldn’t take his eyes off himself. He had been crushed flat with such force that parts of him had scattered like confetti, rocketing off into the night. Yet through it all, some un-pulverized piece of him still pressed to the horn, singing that horrible, shrieking, morbid monotone into the night, unendingly. He felt the strength sapping out of him, could feel himself falling to his knees, when, from behind him, came the voice of someone far older than a preschooler, thick with fear. “Dad?” Instantly, the vision shattered, and the old man in the tiny car finished honking at the drunk passed out in the street, and drove off. Jason felt every impact on the stone beneath him as his knees gave out and he fell.

Jason hissed, shaking his hand, coffee splatting off it and beading on the counter below. It was morning. It was morning, and he’d burned himself pouring coffee into a matching set of kitschy “his & hers” mugs. He turned and slowly looked over his shoulder. For the umpteenth time in what, to him, was a few days, his wife was looking at him with incredulity. His daughter, his teenage daughter, however, was looking at him with fear, and that fear only confirmed that what had happened last night had been real. If it had even been last night to her. His wife coughed. “Coffee, hun? ‘Fore it gets cold?” Jason turned back around, his fingers grazing the side of the “hers” mug. Then they slipped through, as if it wasn’t even there. Eyes wide in shock and horror, Jason clawed at the mug, growing more frantic each time his hand passed through it as though it wasn’t even there. He turned to face his family, eyes frenzied and hands splayed to his side. Suddenly, as though through its own volition, the mug slid across the counter and crashed to the floor, scattering coffee and shards of porcelain everywhere. “What the Hell, Jason? I loved that mug!” Jason stood there impotently as his wife stooped to clean his mess. His mouth gaped for words that wouldn’t come, and he could only stare as his daughter, glaring at him, rose and ushered her mother out the door.

Dumbly, mutely, Jason turned and began cleaning, his limbs clumsy with shock and fear. The spray of coffee and hunks of gnarled porcelain reminded him of the scene from the night before. For the briefest of instants his hardwood floor was speeding asphalt, and he found himself on that fateful road again. Barely suppressing a scream, he rose, heart palpitating. In flickers and spasms of time, in that infinitesimal span between heartbeats, his apartment was gone, replaced instead with the vast and empty road, and the speed, and the wind in his hair, and on all sides of him, inescapable and omnipresent, was the wide and flat face of a massive truck, screaming burnt rubber as it skidded towards him. Inevitable. The truck’s lights filled his vision, the horn reverberating in his head as he collapsed to the ground yet again. He reared back to scream, but found his lungs painfully empty.

Jason found himself squeezing his wife’s hand tighter, a moment before he realized he had been squeezing it at all. She pulled it back and tucked it under her opposite arm, wincing. “Hun, your hand is freezing!” The two of them sat at opposite sides of their kitchen table, a cell phone prone between them. “She has to call soon, right? I told her to call as soon as she lands and the flight should only take . . .” she checked her watch “ . . . another hour or so. I can’t believe you talked me into letting her go on this trip. But for our little baby to get into that school? She’s earned it. And what was it you said? ‘Someone should follow their dreams’?” His wife gave him a look, exhausted and laced with accusation, as Jason stared blankly at the wall. More years had slipped from him, gone forever in an instant. His world was breaking down, or he was breaking down, and with every breath the vice of terror was tighter on his chest. He flailed for his wife’s hand, and she laced it into his own. “Our little girl, a doctor. I love you, baby.” His wife beamed. Jason’s words were an easy jumble, slipping from his mouth, lubricated by fear. “Love. . . too. Love you . . . too.” As he stared straight ahead at that featureless wall, a single scarlet tear crept from the corner of his eye, danced down his face, and leapt from his chin.

When Jason next awoke he understood it to be the final time, and somehow he had begun to understand this sick purgatory he had found himself in. Slowly, body wracked by unfamiliar aches and pains, he rose from a familiar bed in an unfamiliar room. He shuffled to the bathroom, where an unfamiliar and ancient face lurked behind the mirror, peering back at him and mimicking his own bewilderment. He ran a wrinkled hand across the mirror solemnly. The same apartment; all these years spent- would be spent, would have been spent- in the same apartment. Jason wondered if it was himself or his wife who would have convinced the other not to move. Jason crept through the apartment, towards its heart, marveling at the walls covered in degrees, research papers, awards, and photographs, all his daughter’s. A renowned and respected psychologist, an innovative beacon of progress in her field. He felt his chest swell with pride, pride that he knew he didn’t deserve. Pride for what could have been, not for what was. Finally, he’d shuffled over to the aged, beaten and battered leather couch, nearly as old as he was. Doubtless he would have been too proud or stubborn to let his daughter replace it for him. Jason’s wife sat in the middle of it, reading an e-book in oversized font. She looked up at his approach, smiled, began to regale him with the latest tales of their daughter. Jason shushed her, and simply gripped her hand as tightly as his failing limbs would allow, and cradled it in between both his own. He tried to feel her heartbeat through her fingers, but he felt only peace. She shook his hand lightly, back and forth, and said “I love you.” Jason met her eyes, and his heart wrenched in his chest as, for the first time since he’d gotten her pregnant, he was ready to repeat those words and their meaning. He smiled. “I- “

Then came a sound like a great drum bursting, and the couch and Jason’s hands were empty. He shook his head and muttered wordlessly to himself, and hot, thick, crimson tears once more bled from his eyes. The age crept from him, 60 years gone in seconds, and he raised a hand to his face in shock as blood began to run from his nose and the corners of his mouth, great beads flying from his chin to soak into the carpet and the couch below. Tides of solid umbral darkness began to pour from the tops of the walls, knocking the memorials of his daughter’s achievements to shatter on the floor, their shards foaming into nothingness. The walls began to creak and bend and fold in on themselves, collapsing as a thick ebony fog began to seep into being around him. The floor gave way to asphalt and then to the same nothingness that was swallowing the rest of the world, furniture splintering and sinking into it. Jason fell to his knees, sending droplets of blood cascading into that endless nothingness below him. They tumbled downward as that emptiness spread and consumed all, until Jason’s apartment and his life were gone, replaced only with infinite darkness all around him. “No . . .” he whispered. The door remained, however, and crept open to reveal a dazzlingly white rectangular portal. Its light pierced through him and blinded him, and his skin tore and blistered and bled but still he was drawn to it. Still, he plunged his hand into it, though it burned and sizzled, and still he was forced to force himself through, until-

Jason pressed down on the brake pedal, but it was too late. He’d been going too fast, noticed the other truck too slowly, and now he had no chance. Now, 40 tons of truck was barreling into him, screeching and skidding, slamming on the breaks and doing everything except stop. Time still in slow motion, the two vehicles collided, the headlights of the truck perfectly at eye level with Jason, blinding him and feeling like they were burning out his corneas. His car had become a cage, one he was desperate to escape, though he knew he would not. An animal scream tore from his throat, tearing through his vocal chords like a prison cell’s bars. Momentum carried him forward- he hadn’t even been wearing a seatbelt. His head smashed into the steering wheel, cracking his neck into an awkward angle, the scream silenced, all feeling in his body gone. Then the entire steering column pressed up, pushed into the rest of his car by the crash, and began to crush his head against the seat. As his car folded and crumpled around him, in his final moment, Jason realized that it’s a half truth that your life flashes before your eyes when you die.

Because it isn’t the life you lived you see.

It’s the life you lost.