Undiluted Minds

Epilogue

Everything changed that night.

My reason for living was taken from me. I lost my wife and nearly lost my daughter, simply because some asshole didn't call a cab and took it upon himself to drive home after drinking at a bar for three hours straight.

The impact of the truck hitting the driver's side pushed us through the intersection and into that ugly metal sculpture Micha always complained about because it was so hideous.

I guess art-karma had the last laugh as it tore through the passenger side door like a hot knife through butter.

I suppose it didn't matter, we were fucked either way.

If Micha hadn't made John go home with his parents, so he could appreciate the new car that we got him as a graduation present, since his mom wasn't letting him take her car to New York, he would have been in the backseat behind me and died. The entire back half of the car was unrecognizable. If Micha wouldn't have wanted to drive, the ugly sculpture would have impaled her through the stomach killing both her and our daughter. If I wouldn't have been so short and had my seat positioned at the angle it was, I would have been crushed or impaled. If Micha wouldn't have drove, all three of us would have died.

During my stay in the hospital while recovering from a shattered pelvis, and broken leg and arm, I wished that I would have been driving so I could have died with her, so we would have died together as a family. Our daughter, Mekala, was so small and only given a ten-percent rate of survival.

I couldn't handle losing the only part of Micha I had left if she didn't make it.

Micha was in a coma for two months before her body finally gave up on the day that Mekala was released from the hospital. The two of us were stretched out alongside Micha when she took her last breath, as if she was waiting around simply to make sure that we were okay.

I would never be okay, but I had to make an attempt for our daughter.

The cemetery was packed with more people than I could count, but none of them even registered with me. My undivided attention was on the red and black casket being lowered into the ground that held my precious wife.

Dad wanted her buried next to Mother. Why? I didn't know, but I didn't argue with him for once. The bondage wear garden gnome on the headstone was still a topic he refuses to let go.

John got to meet Dr. Joyce when he went to therapy. We both lost the only girl either of us had ever loved, so it was hard on him as well to an extent. But John would get over it and would move on, eventually.

I won't.

Micha was and is the only girl I would ever love, would ever give my heart to, and would ever hold in my arms.

For sixteen and a half years I went through the motions of what I thought was living. Leave it to a six-foot goddess of mischief and chaos named Trouble to pull me from normality and into the brilliant world of color and adventure in her mind. For less than a year she got to call me hers, but for the rest of my life she would be mine...

It's funny how that works.

I met Micha on a Saturday afternoon. It was the second week of August at 12:27 pm. It was sunny out, around seventy-five degrees. Such little insignificant details, but I remembered them so clearly as if I experienced them only yesterday. That chance meeting, the moment she offered me her hand and pulled me on top of a desk with her to quote Braveheart, that single moment of lunacy changed my life forever.

Later that night, in front of her gallery, when she held my face between her slender hands and kissed me, at that moment I knew I loved her. At that moment I knew I couldn't live without her. And at that moment I knew that she would be my only reason for living and the only person that could save me from myself...

And she did.

Micha once told me, when we were watching the stars, that no matter what happens in our lives, no matter what they try to push on us, we can find solace in the fact that we are part of the few, and that we have a gift that supersedes our musical aptitude, artistic abilities, and outshines the spotlight of our physical talents.

We have undiluted minds.

The End.