At birth, everyone has the date they will die tattooed on their arm. You were supposed to die yesterday...
The clock was ticking, and I wondered why the hours, minutes, seconds weren’t slipping away in a more painfully apparent manner. My heart, which I expected to be pounding heavily against my chest, stayed at an even-paced beat. It was an oddly normal experience, and I thought that perhaps this is what everyone feels as they approach their final moment. Everything was fine, and I was calm.
It wasn’t unheard of for a person to be (or appear to be) “perfectly healthy” at the time etched in his or her forearm. People often died suddenly, though not unexpectedly, of a heart attack or a stroke or a freak accident. In fact, those who approached their time while still healthy were often bet upon. High stakes gambling over someone’s life ending is, for lack of a better term, impolite…just as you can imagine it would have been in your time. But I grew up in a society that viewed death as either something tremendous to be feared, or a ridiculous joke. There was no gray area between perspectives. Maybe such attitudes had grown out of the knowledge we were then able to acquire, to ability to pinpoint our death day. Regardless, death was a main focus of society, and ironically enough, the looming presence of it permeated every aspect of life.
Personally, I’d been fearful of death since I was first able to comprehend it. That was even before I realized what the retched mark on my arm meant. It was weird, then, that I was so freakishly calm as the clock counted backwards. Time was marching on as it always had, and I felt nothing.
As my expiration drew nearer, I sat on my bed, in my room, in the tiny apartment I had grown to love and desperately didn’t want to leave. With me were three of the most important people in my life. The only three, in fact. There was my partner in crime, my soulmate, the love of my short life. She sat, holding my hand, looking as if she’d long ago gone into shock. Next to her was my best friend, the one with whom I’d gone through everything with. Holding her had was her amazing boyfriend, who had somehow seamlessly melted into my life. I looked at them with a confidence that came from nowhere or everywhere. I loved them all. I told them it would be okay. We sat in an infinite moment and absorbed each others’ presences.
And then, it was time. The clock stopped counting. The sand in the glass had run out. I held in my breath, confused as to why I was still experiencing the sensation of breathing in the first place.
Eventually, I breathed out. Blinked, looked around. The beautiful three people beside me had matching looks of bewilderment on their faces. My bestest checked the clocks, made sure there was no malfunction. And after another few silent and confused moments passed, her boyfriend finally spoke.
“We need to find a place for you to hide.”
The white hospital gown was fairly comfortable. It was an almost-reassuring throwback to being in my favorite nightgown back my place. But the lab equipment surrounding me was enough to wipe any sense of comfort from my mind. I was a prisoner in the painfully bright testing facility, being interrogated from all angles. They were trying to “encourage” me to talk, to explain, to confess…and the torturous methods they were using to do so terrified me more than death ever had. Nothing was right or okay, and death surely would have been better than my excruciating pain.
I fainted on the “exam table,” half conscious in the first place. I was in and out, incoherent. I dreamed of a guardian angel rescuing me.
She pounced from out of nowhere, knocking out my captors. No wait, she…she killed them? How could that be? How could they not have foreseen their demise coming today, all six of them, on the same day?
Half-lucid, I looked up at the her. Not at angel, but a person, dressed vibrant white to match the walls. She was quickly gathering objects from the room…almost frantically, actually.
Finally, she returned to where I was tied. She undid the knots with expert speed, and held out her hand to help me up.
And on her arm, where there should have been a date…was nothing.
