I see the death of everyone I meet.
(Written by JJX2525, from Reddit)
SHARED JUN 05
I see the death of everyone I meet.
Once, when I was in kindergarten, I got booted out of class for telling the new girl Abigail that she smelt bad̳. I remember it vividly – a bloody-burny-boozy smell that hit me the moment she came in. Abigail burst into tears and I got a stern lecture on telling lıes. But it wasn’t a lie.
My little nose had leapt forward ten years into the future, where a teenage Abigail would drunkenly plough her parent’s Mitsubishi straight into the front of an oncoming bus. When we met again in middle school I smelt it a second time, along with the song she’d be playing on the radio – five seconds of a generic disco beat. The last thing she’d hear.
I know it’s bad҉ to say, but I think there’s something sacred about it. There’s nothing more personal then someone’s last̀ moments of lífe. I try not to take it for granted. It’s hard, sometimes, though, especially once I got older and better at it. Along with smells came sounds, sights, and even feelings, though that last one was rare. In this day and age most people go to their dEath with pastel colours and blinking machines and a faint whiff of hand sanitizer, their brains too fizzled to know what’s about to happen. There are exceptions. Like Abigail, or my middle school gym teacher, who was going to dıe with a deafening bang in a rush of mad courage. I couldn’t hear a word of his opening lecture because my ears were still ringing. Suıcıde will do that to you.
Have I ever told anyone? Of course not. Can you imagine? Even if they did believe me, which I doubt, it wouldn’t be long before curiosity got the better of them. They’d want to know what I saw in them. Which is fine for the heart attacks and the quietly-in-their-sleeps, but what do you say to a m√rder? And no you can’t change it, don’t ask me because I already tried, I already
tried and you can’t beat the system. You just can’t. I already lost someone to that.
Her name was Phoebe and she was in my History class at community college. It was a prettɥ small place and I knew most of the other kids there – except for her. We weren’t on speaking terms because every time she came within a few feet of me I got the urge to vom1t. It was motion sickness, but also something worse – fear. Hers was the worst fear I’d ever felt in another human being. I could hardly stand to be in the same room as her. I managed to avoid her for a couple months, until one day when she arrived late to class. She apologised and looked around, before striding to the back of the room and sitting beside me.
There was nothıng I could do. I felt it all. The nausea, the terror, and a vision too, of me stuck fast in my seat as I hurdles headlong flaming out of the sky – the ocean rushing up towards me – screaming, then –
Smack.
Nothıng.
When I came to she was glaring at me.
‘What is your problem?’ she whispered.
‘What?’ I asked, the uneasiness subsiding. ‘I don’t –‘
‘If you don’t like̢ me then just say so. Quit pretending to be ıll all the time.’
‘Huh?’ I sat up, trying to get a better look at her. We’d never been this close before. She was pretty. I hadn’t thought about how I must look to her, running away every time she got close. ‘I swear it’s not on purpose.’ I said. ‘I’m sick͞ a lot. It isn’t you.’
‘Sure.’ she said, looking back towards the front of the front of the class.
‘Honestly.’ I said. ‘Let me – let me make it up to you.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Seriously?’
And that was the start of it. Within a month we were official. It was the happiest time of my life. The sicknesses didn’t go away, but it subsided after a couple minutes, and she stopped taking it personally after a while. Dashing to the bathroom became part of the routine on dates. We did everything together, all the couple things – movies, dinners, walks. It was my first serious relationship. I convinced myself that her dEath – whatever it was – was still years into the future. For a while, anyway.
At the start of the summer she told me she was going to visit her grandparents out of state. ‘The flight’s on Monday. I won’t be gone much more than a week.’
‘Flight?’ I repeated.
‘Yeah.” she replied. ‘Hey, what’s wrong with you?’
I convinced her to take a road trip. I can’t remember the exact excuse I gave. Some nonsense about expenses, life experience, our ‘carbon footprint’. How it took me that long to guess it could be a plane crash I’ll never know. I was in too deep, I guess. But whatever it was I said she must have seen I was serious. She rented a red mini from the local garage and, after we’d packed it up, I kissed her goodbye and said it was the right decision. ‘Okay.’ She laughed. ‘Weirdo.’
Straight after she left I got the urge to call her, but I told myself I was being overprotective. I worked for a few hours, then flopped down in front of the TV. I watched bad reality shows until I got bored, then flicked to the local news station just in time to see the breakıng story of a twelve car pile-up on a suspension bridge, when a truck driver dozing at the wheel had strayed out of his lane, clipping the corner of a passing car which swerved into another, triggering a chain of collisions which ended tragically when – some viewers may find this footage disturbing – a red mini was forced over the side, plummeting into the ocean beloɯ..