text: I’ve never liked funerals and this one was no different but it was made even worse by the circumstances. It was a ritual I hated in a world that I no longer belonged to. I saw their glances as I walked into the church, crossing my fingers and hoping that I wouldn’t immediately burst into flames. Six months ago, on the night before the Fourth of July, while the country was getting ready to celebrate our nation’s birth I was about to come face to face with death. I was with my girlfriend at a party. Shelly was always the life of the party, smiling, bubbly, cheerful to the last. As the party died down, we got into a fight about our plans for the next day. I wanted to go to the barbeque at my friend Jack’s place; she wanted to go to her parent’s house. She stormed out, I chased her. I caught her in time to keep her from walking home through two miles of dark streets and questionable neighborhoods. I may have averted one disaster but I couldn’t avoid the second. We were still arguing as we drove home. Me trying to focus on the road and Shelly trying to yell over me. We were almost home when I got so mad that I had to close my eyes and breathe deeply just to stay calm. Neither of us saw the light turn red or the truck that was coming into the intersection. The car was destroyed and Shelly was in a coma. I stayed by her side that night until her parents arrived and asked me to leave. They never quite understood what she saw in me and now they had a better reason to hate me. So I went home and did what I did best, I drank. I spent most of the next month in the bottle. With time I got more and more cold shoulders from our friends as they huddled together and looked to the only place where they could lay blame, on my shoulders. She never woke up from that coma and just three days into the new year, she let go. I’ll never know why, or what really happened. The people around me in the Church of the Savior didn’t so much as acknowledge me, to say nothing of actually speak to me. It was clear that they still saw this as my fault, as though if I had just shut up and not argued with her that night, she would still be here. I sat quietly in the back, respectful in my silence. Unable to sing the hymns that Shelly always loved so much, unmentioned in the remembrances, unable to cry the tears that I felt inside me. I loved Shelly, I still do. The day before the accident I had bought a ring. I was planning to propose the next day. It was one of the reasons I wanted to go to Jack’s. He lived close to the lake where I took Shelly on a picnic for our first date. None of these people who now shunned me knew that though, they didn’t realize that I still had that ring, that even now as they turned their backs to me I held it between my fingers in the pocket of my coat, turning my heart to Shelly, as always. Surely I hadn’t been the greatest catch when Shelly and I met. I was unemployed with very little future ahead of me. I smoked and drank too much and had a history of bad decisions. But Shelly saw something more in me and brought it out. I was cleaning up my act and I loved her even more for it. There was something about her that could make the most evil man give up his wicked ways. The crowd stood to say the Lord’s Prayer and as they sat I left my seat and walked to the front. I stared at the framed picture of Shelly surrounded by flowers that sat on an easel above her casket as I walked down the aisle to Shelly instead of with her. The frame and the flowers were gaudy and Shelly would have hated them. In my ears were the gasps of the people at my actions. Her father stood to stop me as I approached her casket. I simply pulled the ring from my pocket, placed it over her heart and walked back down the aisle. Her mother began to cry over the murmurs of the crowd as the ones who could see what happened told those who couldn’t. I walked away from Shelly for the first and only time, took my coat from the foyer and turned my collar up to the January cold as I stepped out into the inappropriately bright afternoon.