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You can read the first 45% of this story for free; if you like it, you can read the rest for $5.00 (payable by paypal or credit card.)

[ Read more about author Jerry Emerson Loomis ]



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The world ends on a dark night, walking in the rain. The world ends half-way across a wet street, with a car skidding suddenly around the corner in a drunken left turn. Blazing headlights. Then the impact . . . . I wish I'd told her how I loved her . . . .


The Heart of the Two-Mile Game

by Jerry Emerson Loomis

THE HEART

THE HEART
OF THE
TWO-MILE GAME

 

Copyright 2006

by

Jerry Emerson Loomis

 

 

 

The world ends on a dark night, walking in the rain. The world ends half-way across a wet street, with a car skidding suddenly around the corner in a drunken left turn.

Blazing headlights.

Then the impact . . . .

 

I wish I'd told her how I loved her . . . .

 

Dark.

I can't move.

 

I can't feel the wet or the cold. Just a floating feeling.

Is this what it feels like to die?

 

I wish I'd told her how I loved her . . . .

* * *

I can barely hear the starchy voice somewhere above me, but the words pound into my brain like dull spikes hammered in by a sledge.

"His heart just won't respond. That's it. Wheel him down to the Death Ward."

 

The world jolts to a stop.

And ends.

For me . . . .

 

I wish I'd told her how I loved her . . . .

 

Three minutes left. The time it takes for the brain to die after the heart stops beating.

Three minutes of dark life.

Three minutes' worth of thinking left in my brain.

 

And then the end . . . .

 

The end!

And I hadn't even started to live!

 

Everything I've ever done was just a "getting ready" to live. A preparation.

But not the living.

 

Why didn't I live?

 

I'm dying, and I've never lived . . . .

 

Three minutes.

I've done things I wish I hadn't.

But the things I didn't do . . . .

 

And now it's all over with.

 

All but three minutes.

 

Why didn't I tell her how I loved her?

 

Why didn't I do a lot of things? Things I wanted to do much more than any of the things I ever got around to doing . . . .

 

Things that should have been easy.

Like saying, "I'm sorry; I shouldn't have done that."

Or, "It takes courage for a man to stand up for what he believes in the way you do. I admire you for that, and I want you to know it."

I could have spent more time with the people who meant the most to me. I wonder if any of them ever knew how much I loved them?

How could I expect them to?

I never let them know . . . .

I could have.

I could have said, "I think you're one of the best people I've ever known. I don't want anything special from you . . . . I just want to be your friend . . . ."

 

Why didn't I?

 

Maybe I didn't feel worthy of them. Maybe I thought I had to go out and do something great before I had the right to be their friend.

 

And maybe I was a fool . . . .

 

I wish I'd told her how I loved her . . . .

 

I could have.

I could have talked to her before she went away. Maybe I could have stopped her.

I could have told her I loved her. I wonder if she knew.

I could have said, "I love you. I always have, and I always will . . . ."

 

I wonder what she would have done, if I'd told her . . . .

 

I could have written to her after she went away. Maybe she would have answered.

But I wasn't sure . . . .

 

I wish I'd tried.

 

When I was afraid to talk to her, I wish I'd talked to her anyway. When I was afraid to write to her, I wish I'd gone ahead and written.

 

I never had the time to write letters. I always had something else I had to get done first.

I wonder how long it would have taken me to get everything done that I thought I had to get done before I wrote my letters.

And I wonder how much time I saved by not writing those letters.

 

And I wonder what I did with all that time . . . .

 

How many minutes' worth of time would I have had to pay to write one letter to her?

 

And what did I end up paying for not writing it?

 

A lifetime?

 

I could have spared her thirty minutes sometime out of my success schedule. Or even twenty. Ten minutes would have been enough to let her know I still remembered her . . . .

 

If I could just have one minute right now, with a pen in my hand!

 

A single minute!

 

One minute, out of my last three . . . .

Sixty seconds would be long enough to say something; long enough to tell her how I love her . . . .

 

FOOL!

I could have told her how I loved her!

 

Why didn't I tell her?

 

Fear?

Shame?

Fear, maybe. But never shame. I was never ashamed of her, and I was never ashamed of my love for her.

And as long as I could remember I loved her, I was never ashamed of myself . . . .

 

Fear? Yes. Maybe . . . .

 

Yes, I think I was afraid . . . .

Of what?

Something vague . . . .

 

The vague fears were always the worst. I never knew what it was I was trying to fight . . . .

 

Why didn't I tell her?

 

Maybe she would have laughed at my love for her. I could never have taken the grief of that.

No, she was a gentle girl. She would never have done such a thing, even if she hadn't loved me.

 

But there were people who might have . . . .

 

Maybe they would have found out, and maybe they would have laughed at my love for her.

 

And maybe I was a fool . . . .

 

I wish I'd told her how I loved her . . . .

 

She was the only girl I ever loved unconditionally. Maybe I loved her so much I was afraid to take the chance of telling her, for fear she'd have to tell me she didn't love me in return.

Maybe I wanted to spare us both having to go through the finishing scene of a friendship.

 

As long as friendship hadn't ended, there was some hope of love to come. . . .

 

So I grasped blindly for her friendship as it existed, or at least as I thought it existed, not daring to do anything that might have destroyed it.

 

But a friendship doesn't have to end suddenly. It can crawl to an end so slowly that you're never sure just where the end of it was. You can't pick out a point in time and say, "This was the last hour of our friendship." All you know is that one day you look for it when you need it, and it just isn't there anymore.

Maybe that's what happened to her half of our friendship.

 

But not mine.

 

I'm in the last three minutes of my half . . . .

 

No. I'll still love her. That's one thing death doesn't have the power to change.

 

I wish I'd told her how I loved her . . . .

 

 

* * *

 


 

Copyright © by Jerry Emerson Loomis . All rights reserved unless specified otherwise above.


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