The Day(s) I Died {Book 1 - Completed}

9

agliophobia

(n.) the fear of being hurt

***

If there is one thing I have learned in my multiple lives, it is that time is a precious thing.

While I may possess all the time in the world—a rather daunting fact—I have seen far too many instances in which the time between two people has been cut short.

Vanessa, the girl who got killed by the bus, didn't get nearly enough time with the man who called out to her.

Bean did not get enough time to move on from me and find a warm, loving home.

Those are only two examples, however.

But it was my ninth death that truly taught me that time is precious.

The death itself was rather stupid: I ended up in a rural town in Wisconsin with no homeless shelter, good jobs, or cheap living, and wound up having to freeze in the back of an alley, using ratty blankets to stay warm.

It worked for a while. It wasn't ideal, of course, but I was close to getting a job and renting a room when the temperature dropped below zero. The first night was awful, the second night was even worse, and on the third night my body finally started to shut down.

A kind police officer found me, though, and I couldn't explain to him through my chattering teeth that I wanted to "just die, please," so he grabbed me up as gently as he could and rushed me to the emergency room.

It was there that I came face-to-face with the truth of time.

See, as I was lying on a hospital bed, my lips blue and my eyelids lined with frost, I took a moment to watch others around me, and what I saw was nothing short of heartbreaking.

A boy, probably in his early teens, was lying in the bed next to mine, his breathing shallow, his eyes half-lidded, and his blood staining the sheets of the bed around him. A woman with graying hair stood next to him, her lips curled as she tried not to sob, one hand clutched in his and the other intertwined with the man next to her—the boy's parents, I imagined.

I'm not sure what had caused his injuries, but I knew he was going to die. Why else would the doctors not be working on him?

He was a lost cause.

Nonetheless, his parents clutched at his hands, and I was able to catch his mother's choked words.

". . . love you so much," she was saying. "Okay? So much."

The boy smiled softly. "Love you," he returned, the words barely audible. "Tell Fee, alright? Tell Fee I love her and I'm sorry."

His mother only cried harder. "It's not your fault!" she protested almost viciously. "It was an accident—it's not your fault!"

The boy's smile dipped for a second but came back quickly.

(I saw through it; when you have faked emotions as often as I have, you learn to recognize when they're genuine and when they're not.)

"Tell Fee," he coughed, and the sound quickly shifted into a groan. "Tell Fee," he tried again, shifting on the bed as if looking for a comfortable position. "Tell Fee I kept all her drawings and I want her to get my stuff, 'kay? She," he swallowed heavily, his eyes landing on the ceiling and growing farther away by the second, "was the best sister. Always the best, my little Fee . . ."

He trailed off and didn't speak again after that, and I can still hear the sound of his mother's heart cracking when she realized he was gone. In between her hysterical sobs, she told her husband, "H-he wa-was too yo-y-young! We did-didn't have en-enough time!"