it got cold.

they weren’t even moving. 

they had been sitting in the car, at a stoplight, waiting eternally to turn left. the light changed, a slow blink from red to green. they still couldn’t move, waiting for an arrow to appear. some lunatic, a crazy man in a brand-new truck, blew past them. in passing, he swerved—god knows why. he was distracted, his attention broken for a fragment of time. it was fatal, that fragment. his truck crunched into the front corner of their car, the driver’s side. the sound, the sound, the sound. glass shattering and the sickening low punch of metal crumpling. she was thrown back and forth with the impact, but the seatbelt reined her in.

and now, she had sat had watching his chest rise and fall (slowly) for so long. they told her it wasn’t over. they called it a coma—she had called it hope. in the beginning, she could content herself with looking at his still face, hungrily almost. he was bruised and bandaged, but he breathed. the nurses were nice. all of them exchanged looks of sympathy when she walked by; they rubbed her back when she sat staring at him during the midnight shift. they wanted to know all the details, so she told them she was his girlfriend, his serious girlfriend, that a ring had been in the near future. 

mostly that was a lie. they had loved each other, in an inescapable way. she always fell for her best friends, and he just fell for her hair. they woke up next to each other. she made him try harder; he made her coffee in the mornings. it was odd, though, because they didn’t truly belong to each other, not in any sort of binding way. she didn’t call him her boyfriend, and there were parts of him she couldn’t reach. but she was there, every day, at the hospital, staring at his same, motionless body. she waited.

days wore on. she was tired. it got cold outside.

november had been around for at last two weeks before she realized its presence. she sat next to the hospital bed eating a cup of soup, her knees drawn up. she looked at him and felt the dull pressure of nothing. as soon as she finished her soup, she left, tossing the plastic bowl in the trash. two weeks later, in the first of a cold december, another  man asked to take her out. she said yes, and sat in the dark movie theater with him hours later. she held his hand, crying the quietest, slowest tears.

when she got home, the red light on her answering machine blinked rapidly, the Morse code of missed calls. she pressed play. the nurse from his floor came on, saying coolly, “Dr. Litman wanted me to let you know that it’d probably be a good idea for you to come up to the hospital as soon as possible. We figured you’d want to be here.” Her voice cut off, just like that, the long shrill beep of the machine.

she reached for her keys in a panic of guilt and fear.