Juxtapose

The car stilled to a stop. His hands dropped from the steering wheel to his lap, and suddenly he said, "Well, Goodnight." It is so strange the way that years of experiences ebb, flow, and all too quickly culminate into an anti-climactic yet gutwrenching finish. So this is it? Everything of everything ends like this? The finish doesn't seem as finished with as it should, and I'm nearly floating adrift, waiting to come back down and hit the floor of reality. All this time I have waited for the goodbye so that the guilt I have imposed (hopefully unduly) upon myself would finally fade. I pictured it all - we would both quietly, slowly move in our separate directions. Yet it was not so quietly in my imaginations. My tears were there, yet they didn't fall, and the words that I so gravely wanted to say were trapped inside me with all the bottling up of a corked flagon of wine with no corkscrew. I shivered (as it seems I always do when I'm nervous), and I sat on my hands, trying to warm up. I wanted to say that I was sorry. I really did. That it was all my fault and I take wished I could take back my part in this undoing, even though I knew that it wouldn't be the better thing to do. I wanted to say that I was never as aloof as I would make myself out to seem; that I was always paying attention. I wanted to ask if I could fix things somehow. I wanted to be anywhere but that vehicle that night, and at the very same moment, it was the only place I wanted to be. I hoped that we could drive through the inky darkness for just ten more minutes, buying cheap time for the chance to grope for my perfect words. My constant struggle - the search for my words, for coherency, for perfection of eloquence - always seems to manifest itself at the wrong time. Just to speak the right words and to go out boldly in the face of this end would be a blessing, just to control something in the situation. But it seems nothing ever goes as planned, and yet everything falls as we choose.