She was gone. And there was nothing he could do about it.
He closed his eyes as tightly as possible, trying to block the images from flooding his mind. But it just kept replaying. The light in his face, her eyes widening and her head whipping around to look at him one last time. Her blue eyes falling blank, immediately after the impact, and her hair flying into his face as she crashed into him, giving him a whiff of that honey smell. That smell would always haunt him, now, instead of making his day sweeter.
It was in slow motion. He didn't understand how something going so slowly could hurt someone so badly, but he knew it wasn't really slow.
He knew that both cars had actually been going over forty, and that it had all happened in a matter of seconds.
To him, though, it was like a movie, when they slow down at the dramatic parts, the parts that change the character's life forever.
He hadn't even told her he loved her that day. He told her everyday when they went to sleep.
He wished he were with her. Or that he had been the one sitting in the passenger side. He wished anything else had happened, anything that could have kept her happy.
Anything but this.
-----
She wished that the last thing she had seen were his smile, not the look of horror that had crossed his face.
At least it had been his face, though, that she saw. Still, she wished that they hadn't gone to work that morning, so she could still be with him.
It had happened so quickly. She still could feel the smile leaving her face as she realized what was happening in the busy intersection, as she turned to look at him. She remembered her exact thought at that moment. "If I am going to die, the last thing I want to see before it happens is Tommy's face." So she turned as quickly as possible, and she was lucky she turned when she did, because a split second later and she heard a loud noise and everything fell blank.
She expected to see a white light at the end of a tunnel, or strong hands reaching out to her, but instead, she was sitting in a theater, with a stage flooded by lights in front of her.
Tommy was there, a hand extended, ready to lead her onstage. She would have thought that she was alive, if she hadn't known better.
But she knew the force of the impact couldn't have left her alive. She knew that heaven was here, with a stage, a guitar, and the love of her life.