Who They Were

If I thought hard enough, I could remember the events of yesterday. They still hung over me, like some inescapable shadow that I was aware of but couldn't quite see.

There had been three of us, that much I knew for sure. The rest was swimming around in the deep end of my mind, a place without lifeguards or any other supervision. Getting there was difficult in the best of conditions, which these were not.

An older woman and younger man emerged from the shadows, or the pool depending on which metaphor you prefer. When I say older, I mean she was in her thirties. It's a relative thing, being that he was in his twenties.

They could have been friends, lovers, brother and sister, all of the above. I can't find their relationship in my distorted memory banks. I only see them standing next to a car in the rain. It's a Mercedes wagon, old and beaten like some washed-up backwoods boxer. Hard to tell the color in the dark, not that it matters much.

Who knows why they were there. That's the thing about fate. It doesn't give a shit. Like the color of a beater car in the rain. It's just a thing that is, dig?

Maybe they had been happy once. Or maybe they were always this miserable. Maybe not miserable, but at least lost. Searching for something. Or they'd called the search off. Like the operation had gone from rescue to recovery. Body bags and what not.

Trouble is, details still escaped me. My vision of events was as blurry as the vision of that boxer I was telling you about earlier. You remember, the Mercedes wagon? The one in the rain?

I'm pretty sure that part happened. I just wish I knew who they were.