Ignite Prologue

I fucking hate you sometimes…

      The words replay in my head as if on loop. Like I’ve died and gone to Hell where I’m tortured with those five cruel words over and over again. The words from the same lips that used to whisper “I love you” as he held me in the middle of the night. The lips that, at one point, couldn’t wait to say I do. Those beautiful lips that I thought I’d spend the rest of my life kissing. “I fucking hate you…” Yep, definitely Hell.

      Hell on Earth that is. I’m still here. He’s the one who’s gone. The love of what I thought would be my life, the man I married. The one I was so sure I’d wake up to every single morning until the good Lord decided to bring me home. The same man, who, on what was unknowingly his last day, spoke those five heartless, torturous words that he will never, ever get the chance to take back. That man’s gone, and I’m still here, broken and alone.

      Look, I’m not a complete idiot. Just an overly dramatic one. I know my husband loved me. He’d loved me for more than seven years, and that hadn’t changed. We’d just spent the morning lying in bed for a few extra minutes so we could be close. He fingered my hair as he told me he loved me and was looking forward to the weekend getaway we had planned. He wasn’t going through the motions; he meant every word as he gave me a preview of what he has planned for our downtown Chicago hotel, if we ever decided to get out of bed and hit the road. It’s just that I can be a raging psycho when I’m pms’ing, and then throw in a wine hangover and I turn into Satan’s worst nightmare. Every month it’s either intense cramping for four days or my husband wonders where this crazy bitch stashed the sweet woman he married. Suffice it to say, I was not cramping this month.

      I understood his frustrations with me when I was like that, and any other time I would’ve just ignored those words because I usually deserved them. I knew he’d end up doing something to make me laugh in the moments that followed because neither of us could stay mad for long. This was different. He’d never used the word hate before. It caught me by surprise and, at the time, I was extremely thankful for the sunglasses on my face as I looked out the window at the fields of towering windmills in the Indiana countryside.

      Hate. I hate onions. I hate Ohio drivers in the winter. I hate anything sparkly vampire related.

I hate a lot of things, I really do, but it’s a strong emotion that I only use when thinking about trivial things. My husband, though? Never, not once, have I ever felt hatred towards him, and it tore me in two to hear him say those words. And what’s worse is that I’ll never hear him say anything again.                         

      We never did make it to Chicago. I don’t remember much about that accident. Actually, I don’t remember the accident at all. A car accident. I used to think that was so cliché. Couldn’t life be a little more creative? And now, here I am, widowed at 26 because of a damn car accident that I have no memory of, only splotchy nightmares that only give me snippets of what happened.

      The eye witness and police reports say that a young college student was running late to get on to the Purdue campus for his early afternoon classes. He cut us off, clipping the front end of our car. We ended up spinning into oncoming traffic where we were hit by an SUV on the driver’s side. He was killed instantly. I was knocked unconscious. When I woke up the next day in an Indianapolis hospital, I knew.

      “Mrs. Tate, I wish we could have done something, but he was killed on impact. Take solace in knowing that he felt no pain….” the doctor continued, but his words were drowned out in my mind, replaced by others.

      

       I fucking hate you sometimes.