Love and a Speeding Car Book Abstract

A speeding car. A lonely lover. A collision set in stone.



The young man stands in the middle of the road, the glow of the street lamp breaking his face into sharp geometrics of contrast, dark and light. A simplicity reflected inside his mind, that of black and white, right and wrong, good and evil.

Friends and the faceless.



That simple duality has governed everything he's thought or done his entire life, it was his only reality, his only conviction was in the absence of grey.

That all ended the day she came into his life.

She'd blasted his safely guarded convictions to pieces, her arrival shattering a lifetime of certainty as easily as he might tumble a carefully constructed house of cards.



The road stretches out into the infinite darkness behind him, its black joining that of the surrounding night, far beyond the reach of his eyes. Not that he's looking back. He stares straight ahead, his eyes on the future. Up ahead the road disappears in a bend behind the deep dark of the forest to his right. You never can see whats coming. He smiles at that, a bitter grin, and begins to walk slowly along the road towards the bend.



Some small distance away, a blue Honda civic is speeding down the same road, the driver, a middle-aged man, is drunk and euphoric. He clutches the wheel in white-knuckled hands, leaning over it and peering into the darkness outside the car through squinted eye's, wreathed in red, his vision blurred by alcohol. His smile is not bitter, he is racing his wife's suspicion home, hoping desperately to beat it there. He has just spent the day being entertained between the the bare thighs of a “hot young piece of fluff,” a girl hardly older than his own daughter. His clothes still reek of the sickeningly sweet perfume she wears. The scent is awful but it reminds him of the girl and he smiles, shifting in his car seat, his hard-on pushing painfully outward against the inside of his fly. He rubs his crotch and presses his foot flat on the accelerator.



These are the times the world closes in on you.

Everyone is either the enemy or unavailable. Friends seem to be so hard to find, where once there were many, everything is suddenly empty, bare and lifeless.

He couldn't say that he had no friends, that would be a lie, but somehow none of them seemed to matter anymore. With her gone, the colour had gone out of his world. He knows his friends matter, he cares about them still but the caring is remote, hard to reach. He's tried to tell himself that he wishes he had never met her, but he knows that's a lie. He can only futilely wish he had never lost her.



He feels so much older than his years warrant. He knows she'd laugh at that, poke fun at the cliché, and he'd laugh along with her. She always made him laugh, even when he was the joke, which he usually was. Even this walk is laughable, this pathetic little, self-imposed exile. She'd never have condoned it.