The headlights had an aura around them because of the circular scratches in the motorcycle helmet’s face shield just a few inches from my face. I could feel my long hair streaming over my shoulders from the cold wind. The headlights had been three or four miles away when they first made their artificial sunrise. Now they fill my universe. First the stars disappear in the plastic-hazed glare in the face shield. Then the mercury vapor lights in the surrounding farmyards are obscured, and then, finally, so is the motorcycle’s speedometer and odometer; just two feet in front of my eyes.

For the next few moments there will be nothing for me to see but the single blinding brightness closing at two hundred feet per second.

I flash my High Beam up and down, but he doesn’t dim his lights.

Idiot. The thought is automatic and so is the thought which follows it. Will this be the time? I have always been a fatalist. People find that odd. So pretty and so cynical an outlook. But when my time is up, it’s up; and I figure that there are only three kinds of people out riding on the road at two in the morning. Drunks; half-drunks; and me.

I tense as I slow down to forty-five and wonder what it will be like if this turns out to be The Time. The time when my time runs out.

I wonder how everyone that I know will find out about it. Will they see it in the newspaper some time tomorrow? Or will they hear it on the radio in the morning? I wonder if they will cut out the little half paragraph and save it. Maybe running across it in the back of an old drawer in a year or so; the paper it’s printed on looking all yellow, dog-eared and worn.

The impact of the event will fade, no doubt, with time. Probably a very short period of time, all things considered. I know because I have experienced it myself. It’s nothing personal, it’s just the way things go. Besides, the length of time doesn’t really matter. The effect is the same. Memory relegated to the past. To be revisited occasionally when the person is forced to remember something about it.

How many cups of coffee have I drunk with them? How many discussions and friendly arguments over things that meant, really, nothing at all? I have a reputation for expounding arcane facts and knowledge; for stretching the truth, exaggerating and bending logic until you would swear that you would hear it snap in two. They knew all of that. They all knew me. And yet, they didn’t know the real me, really, at all. There are things inside my head that I’ve never told anyone and I never will.

I think that some of them will go and take a look at my motorcycle, wherever it ends up afterwards; perhaps out of a morbid sense of curiosity. “It’s sort of strange,” they’ll say, “but it doesn’t look that bad…considering what happened to her.”

Motorcycles never do, do they? Nothing bad. A few scratches. Scrapes. Dents, here and there. Turn signals and the tank and the engine’s side cover crushed or missing. There will be the pungent smell of gasoline and spilled oil and the uprooted weeds and grass wedged into the crevices along its sides will have turned a very light brown, almost white; like tiny little bones.

They will look at the odometer and note the miles I had accumulated, and wonder what the last six-tenths of the ride had been like and if I had been having a good ride before it had all happened. They would remember how much I loved that bike, how much time I had spent cleaning and generally fussing away at it. And they will think that they know how I would feel if I could see it sitting there forlorn like that.

And they would be wrong.

There is a slight buffet of wind as the car goes by maybe ten feet away on the left. My eyes try to adjust to the darkness again.

Plenty of room.

There is always plenty of room.

I know that because I am an optimist.

I always have been.