Heaven rested her head against the seat and drifted back into her thoughts.
Where was the Lord when Peter infected me with HIV?
The question echoed through her mind, unanswered.
As though that betrayal alone had not been enough, Peter had disappeared from her life without a word. He had thrown away his SIM card, vanished without explanation, and had not spoken to her for more than six months.
She closed her eyes. All she had wanted was to escape the suffocating grip of Pastor Alex, if only for a little while. She had longed to feel desired, cherished, and free—to experience, even for a single night, what it was like to be loved by a man who chose her.
She had imagined Peter would be that man.
The one who would sweep her off her feet, make her believe in love again, and perhaps become the beginning of the future she had always dreamed of.
Instead, he had become the source of her greatest nightmare. He had given her the virus. The thought was like a knife that refused to stop cutting.
Why?
The question tormented her more than the diagnosis itself. Had he known he was infected?
If he had, had he been carelessly passing it on to other women, leaving behind broken lives wherever he went? Or had he been completely unaware that he carried the virus until it was too late?
She wanted desperately to believe the latter. It was the only possibility that left room for the man she had once thought she knew. But then another question surfaced, one she could never answer. If he didn't know...
Why had he disappeared?
Why throw away his SIM card?
Why cut off every means by which she could reach him?
Why abandon her without a single explanation?
No matter how she arranged the pieces in her mind, they refused to fit together.
All she was left with were questions... And silence.
For the first time since last week, the doctor told her she was now living with HIV; she was so distraught and grief-stricken, her face awash in hot tears. Fury and pain tore through her soul. Peter has denied her forever, not just three times.
She remembered the sentence of the woman and hissed again. Where was Jesus when her life first fell apart three years ago? Where was the Lord that very sad evening when robbers killed her father right in front of her, her sister, and her mother simply because he tried preventing one of them from raping her sister? The trauma of that very day still hunts her sister. She now sees people and things that aren't really there, claiming to have conversations with spirits and ghosts of dead people. Why hasn't God healed her for the past three years? They have been fasting and praying. How will the sister ever have a normal life? Who will fall in love with her? Who will marry her? It was all just fucked up; her life is a complete mess.
After the sad passing of her father, she took the burden of catering for her family while her mother recovered from the shock of his death. That was why she agreed to date Alex, her family's pastor. He was there for them, bringing in the money, care, and concern. She felt like she owed him and would occasionally reward him with sex. Not like she loved him or anything. If only she knew; she would have stayed with him. The sex was bad, the money was good, and he didn't have HIV. How is she going to face him when she gets home? She thought as fresh, hot tears of regret streamed down her eyes.
She boarded this bus going back home to her mother. She will be taken care of and some advice dished out to her. That's the only option she has now, or one of these days she might actually go through with suicide. But she had already made a mistake, and suicide was yet another one. She is already going through hell; it is better to keep going.
Out of the blue, a voice on the bus screamed, "That's her! Driver, that's her! "Stop the bus! Driver! Stop the bus…!" The driver, probably lost in his own thoughts, responded to the sudden panic by applying brakes while the bus was at full speed, which resulted in a quick and swift tumble of the bus.
Inside, everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Heaven felt herself departing from her body. Emanating from the bus through the roof as though no frame of metal walls were there, angling upward and outward until she stood about three stories high above the ground. She was looking down, at the scene below, existing independent of time and matter. There, above, she watched her body still in the bus while it toppled further at great speed into the forest till it came to a halt in front of a huge tree.
Confused as to what was happening, fearing for her body, she flew effortlessly to the scene, going right through the bus like a hot knife through butter, only to find blood dripping from the nostrils and mouth of her body. She lay halfway between this world and the next, upside down and stuck on her seat. She tried pulling her body down, but her hands went through like a sun ray through a pane of glass. She tried screaming, but no one heard her. Left with no other option, she had to wait for rescue, and soon it came. People came pulling out the victims from what was left of the wreckage.
She watched as they carried her body from the bus into the rescue car and rushed her to the closest hospital. She flew after the bus. Worried for her body, if it dies, where will she go? What will happen to her? Will she become a sad, ugly ghost in white, wandering the earth hopelessly, causing mayhem and terror? Will she take a golden ladder to heaven? Or a long rope down to the pit of hell? Will she reincarnate into a wealthy princess? Maybe become one with the stars? Or just sleep forever in a dark, cold grave? Will the Grim Ripper take her soul?
She doesn't know what to face when her body dies, and it scares her. All her life she had feared death, suppressed dealing with it, and never been ready to depart. For her, there would always be another tomorrow and the day after.
At the hospital, she was still at an elevated angle, from where she watched the doctors trying their possible best to keep her in this world, but death came for her with a slow rattling gasp; her breathing would stop for a time only to reemerge like a drowning victim coming up for one last breath. In a few moments, she passed on, her earthly tether separated, and it was lights out.