It was 2:30 in the morning.
The world wasn’t just asleep — it felt emptied out. The highway was a black ribbon pulling me forward, bordered by cornfields that vanished into fog. The stalks stood tall and motionless, an army of silent witnesses. The air was three degrees — that kind of October cold that doesn’t bite; it seeps in and stays.

I was driving to Blyth, an hour from anywhere, my body powered by caffeine but my soul still caught in sleep. I lifted my cup, took a sip, and the headlights cut through the mist — and there it was.

A raccoon, lying still on the road.
And beside it, a smaller one, trembling, alive.

It was nudging the body with its head, over and over, with a desperate tenderness that broke the air open. Tiny paws pressed against fur, a faint push, a quiet pleading. As if love, by sheer will, could restart what had already stopped. It wasn’t just grief. It was hope refusing to die.

I stopped the car. The engine idled — the only sound left in the world. The fog wrapped the two small shapes like a curtain of smoke. My breath slowed. My eyes burned. That tiny creature’s confusion felt painfully human — that blind belief that one more touch, one more whisper, could undo the thing already done.

And suddenly, I wasn’t there anymore.
I was nineteen again, standing on another road outside another small town. A car flipped in a ditch. Two parents — gone before help could come. Their baby, still in the seat, crying, reaching, touching their faces, trying to wake them.

I had buried that memory for years. I thought it had faded. But there, in the middle of the fog and cornfields, it returned — sharp, cold, and alive. The same silence. The same helpless love.

We all do this, don’t we?
We stand beside what’s gone — old friendships, past versions of ourselves, people who once held our whole sky. We keep nudging them in our minds, whispering, “Just once more.”

And we keep trying.
Because love, even when it’s shattered, doesn’t know how to stop.

When I finally pressed the gas, I saw it once more in the mirror — that small, trembling figure beside its still world. The image stayed. It still does.

That’s why I’m writing this — to give it a place to rest. A small marker for all the moments when we’ve stood beside something that will never move again, still whispering, “Wake up.”

And maybe that’s what both breaks us and saves us —
that love keeps trying,
long after hope has gone cold.