By Avni Nawani
My friends ask me to stay and have another slice of pizza,
I feel odd, peculiar, so I leave anyway.
Walking on the worn footpath, I have to cross the road,
I am not present here, my legs guide me themselves, I'm thinking of a different matter.
A blur of white and black crossing,
I didn't look left or right, I just started walking.
Comes a car cruising over speed limit, too late I realize will it hit me.
Impact is first felt on my abdomen,
My head comes in contact with the asphalt.
I start descending into stillness.
My eyes start drifting, the last thing I see, a person looming over me, frantically calling emergency services.
Somehow I cannot recall the pain, nor thoughts firing in my brain.
My only memory, the scene, through my barely conscious self.
I heard somewhere that before you die, you get a 7 minute flashback of all your life.
I start with my memories,
From my mom braiding my hair for school,
To her scolding me for not cleaning up my room.
From me learning to play soccer for the first time,
To me crying over a bad grade.
I go back to my best friend, who now feels too far away,
The first time my heart fluttered looking at my first crush.
Now grateful for the day that I thought couldn't be any more nefarious.
Then came by the "if only's"
If only I had spoken up in that argument,
Had I not lost a friend that day.
If only I would have been there sooner,
Had I not lost the job to a woman much more punctual than me.
If only I had been a better person,
Must my parents be gleaming with pride.
If only I had appreciated what life had offered me,
I'd have a couple more breaths.
Then a wave of cold air hits me,
I don't know if it did actually or I'd imagined it.
I was now somewhere else.
A spectator of my own life.
As I see moments that I cannot recall.
Now unveiled, it was the other path down the road that I did not take.
I watch keenly how my life would have turned out when my life actually went the way I dreamed it to.
The miniscule decisions making the grandest changes,
That version of me I couldn't recognize but how really wished was me that I knew.
It's difficult to say how much time has gone by,
It may be a minute or five.
It feels like a lifetime or lifetimes have passed,
From my memories, to failures, to drowned dreams.
All the what-ifs and the other lives I could have lived,
If only had I taken the other turn at different crossroads of time.
I wondered at last, what if...
I had stayed with my friends for another slice of pizza.