Killing deer

I don't have much fucking left here. I can't listen to the music without crying.

I do remember a day when my mother and I were driving some 1980's model silver station wagon.. or maybe it was the orange honda civic, nonetheless, we were driving through the heavily wooded back roads where I grew up. It's funny how I remember the trees being thicker than they really are.. always. I wish they were thicker. A lush green mountain is not so lush up close. It is rough and jagged. When I last returned to my childhood home and drove the winding back road so that I could be enveloped in that velvety tunnel... there was no tunnel. The trees were thinned out and it felt barren.

A deer jumped out from my side of the car and we smashed into it.

It flew up and hit the windshield, busting it, just like I did when I was hit by an older model station wagon a decade later.

I don't remember too much about it after we hit it. I was that same little girl who woke up for the animals.

I imagine that I saw it's heart racing. It's eyes wild. Broken, mangled, out of it's depth and knowing it was going to die.

I can't truly guess what it was thinking laying there, under our human gaze and hysteria, stepping from our hideous death dealer to really elevate the terror in this creature's last moments.

But, honestly, I always imagine that it was on it's way to meet another deer. And that the other deer waited in a cool place by a creek, dreaming, dozing, worrying and despairing in that one spot in a grove between freeways and swamp and that they died there waiting for the other deer to return to them.