Long-term Resident

“this is just depressing”  When you’ve lived somewhere for a while (say 5 years), you accrete memories of ‘what happened here’ as you drive by.  I now pass several places (daily) where someone died violently.

18-year-old graduation party-hopper, whose SUV failed to negotiate the curve

17-year-old girl going somewhere in her mother’s SUV (she’d banged up her own the week prior) died when the SUV flipped on a straight road on a sunny spring morning; she wasn’t wearing a seat belt and died at the scene

middle-aged motorcyclist died at this intersection when someone simply wasn’t paying attention; no charges filed that I know of

middle-aged man in SUV kills two high-school students and seriously injures a third.  they crossed a six-lane highway just past the crest of a hill after dark; he’d had two glasses of wine.  he is prosecuted.

middle-aged business owner with a gun permit kills a woman over a minor traffic accident (or maybe he killed her boyfriend when they got into an argument, does it matter?)

the night shift manager at a fast-food outlet is murdered by someone; case not solved

middle-aged man fatally shoots his father at home

middle-aged man recently released from the mental hospital stabs his wife to death (or maybe he fatally stabbed his son, with his wife looking on, does it matter?)

two girls, drunk, driving too quickly in a cheap car, die when it fails to negotiate the curve

four teenagers, the driver with a penchant for going very fast, die when they ignore a stop sign and are t-boned; all except one are not wearing seatbelts and are thrown from the car, which stops inches away from a home

young, distraught man is run over by an SUV, which is never found.  no word if he survived

There are other incidents.  Why has this gotten itself engraved on my mental map of my town?  What does the long-term layering of this crap mean?  Part of this revolves around the dual mysteries of why these things happened and what happened afterward.  There is no resolution for most of these events.  So, there.