I dreamed. I was driving home from town late at night. Might have been 11:45, might have been three a.m. But it was dark, and most lights in people's homes were off.

My head felt heavy, and light at the same time, and everything looked darker than it should have, as though I were driving with daytime headlights. I debated pulling over, but I was so close to home - it was within a kilometre, another minute of driving would get me there. The next turn I took, I took either too fast, or didn't turn the wheel far enough, or both, but my car went into the grassy ditch. Here, I fell out, uninjured. I looked over to see my car keep going, roll, bounce, jerk up into the air, roll a few more times, land on its wheels, and skid out of my line of sight.

Despite wanting to just lie in the ditch and sleep, I knew I had to get to a phone to call my parents. I followed a long walkway to a big white building with maroon trim, which turned out to be a swanky pub, with food, card tables, and a bar. I told the owner, a short guy in a blue jacket and black ball cap, what had happened. He showed me to a phone I could use. It was yellow.

My mother answered, barely awake. She cried when I told her the news, then asked about the car. I told her there had probably been thousands of dollars of damage done.

The next morning, I woke up in my own bed, and walked down to the scene of the accident. One of my neighbours was working in his yard, and seemed angry with me. I soon found out why - tire skids littered his backyard, and my car was wrapped around a thick post there, literally bent at a ninety-degree angle. I started bawling, hysterically. What was worse, I soon noticed, was what lay beneath the man's feet - a very dead black and white cat, in the path of those tire skids. It looked like it had been licking its leg, and was just plowed over by my car. I broke down on my knees, crying so hard I couldn't breathe.

Later, I was at home, and my mother was yelling at me.... Apparently the whole community had caught wind of the story, and the general assumption was that I'd been drunk. I kept insisting, no, I wasn't drunk, I don't drink, I hadn't had a fucking drop... would a blood test prove it? I wanted to prove myself right, so badly.... I knew, but nobody else would see. One man even asked me, if I didn't drink, how come I didn't have a "sXe" ("straight-edge") tattoo? I tried to knock into him the sense that the absence of a tattoo didn't mean anything incriminating to me, but he wouldn't hear it. Even my mother was angry that I'd been drunk-driving. I kept protesting that I was just tired, but everyone thought it was a lie.

Somewhere in there I was in my brother's room, found out he smoked pot, had smoked an 11" (massive) joint earlier that day and was high right at that moment, and somehow I thought that was cool.

I kind of wish... I'd taken the chance to "have" you when you offered it to me. Perhaps things would be different now, though my head says that they wouldn't. It might have been my last chance to touch the feelings, the memories, of passionate, joyful occurrences in our past. But I let them slip away, because I feared you had already.

If nothing else, it might have caused you more guilt. But I often wonder, if there wasn't the slim chance... that it might have woken you up, might have made everything clear, might have made you realize... that you want to be with me... that we could be okay, again.