It's not easy to make friends in this line of work. Actually, you might say it's impossible. And maybe we weren't even friends. I know, deep down, you were afraid of me, like anyone would be. At the very least, you hid it enough for me to surprise myself by thinking you a friend.
When your sister died, and you saw me, there was a distinct lack of anger, or disdain, or any sense of a grudge in your eyes. You weren't at peace, but you didn't assign me any blame. Maybe you were more upset at the tumor, or something more tangible like that. It wasn't especially surprising, either. I'm used to people hating me, but it's not like everyone does. You mostly kept to yourself, dealt with the grief alone. Before I left with your sister, she pointed back at you, drawing my attention to a single tear finally bursting out from your eyelid, sullying the dry cheek beneath it. People assume I'd be numb to it, but these scenes never get easier.
The second time we met, you were about twice as tall as I'd remembered you, walking a city street. A curse of my condition is never being able to forget a face. A white sedan swerved and dyed itself red with a family of three pedestrians right in front of you. And I thought I was cursed. I didn't really notice you there, at first. My back was turned to you while I was briefing the family on their current situation. That never got easier, either. I wasn't having any luck getting the father to calm down, but something about you candidly approaching me either soothed him or shocked him out of his unraveling. Not that I can blame him; I was probably even more shocked. In all of my eternity with humanity and my indestructible memory of it, nobody had ever talked to me so casually.
I had been approached before by callous world leaders, thinking themselves to be above immortal, and vengeful family members, begging once again for a miracle. Miracles I could perform, but can't and won't. Your first words to me were reminiscent of the latter. "Are you the one who took my sister?" I guess you had it in your head that there were multiple of me, or that had the same job as me. I'm not usually one to converse with the living, since it usually becomes more trouble than it's worth for both parties involved. I guess I felt indebted to you for calming down the once wailing dead father, so I replied with a simple nod. I turned to lead the family to their next home, but you grabbed softly onto the tail of my cloak. I met your blank gaze and reached to detach myself from you, but you let go first. "Are you gonna take me, too?" The grim words were spoken plainly, almost sarcastically.
Regretting my decision to respond in the first place, I hastily and ominously replied, "when the day comes." I turned just slowly enough to see your faint smile curve into formation. With a snap, the family and myself were gone from the scene, leaving you behind in the aftermath of sirens and police radios.
A key difference between myself and so-called "first responders" is my ability to arrive before an incident occurs. I'm not omnipotent; I can't pinpoint the exact time and place for just anyone's death off the top of my head, but I know when someone is about to die. This leads to some awkward false alarms, sure, but I'd rather be early anyway. Not that I particularly prefer watching people die in real time either, but it's part of the job. Imagine my surprise when one night, one of the aforementioned false alarms turned out to be you, and only a mere couple of days after our last encounter. I appeared in your apartment to find you asphyxiating yourself in a bathtub, eyes still peeking over the surface. Once you noticed me, you shot up out of the tub and coughed out the water- clothed, of course.
It's anyone's guess as to why I stayed as long as I did. Naturally, I was curious about the only person to purposefully seek me out and live on after the fact, but it went beyond that. We talked, for hours, in your kitchen, then about five feet away in the living room, then about another five feet away onto your bed. Hours that I would later have to make up for. After all, people don't stop dying for my sake. You seemed to purposefully drive the conversation away from yourself. You asked me questions about myself, my job, hobbies, whatever. Not that I had much of an answer for any of those. Death, for humans, is the most uniting factor, the one thing everyone has in common. People agonize over it, hate it, find meaning to it, run away from it, and create all kinds of stories about it. About me. When you really get down to it and look at me, well, what you see is what you get. I didn't have much to say, yet you persisted.
"You really don't do anything else? Other than, you know, kill people?"
Not really. Though I don't really kill them, they just die.
"But they're not really gone until you take them."
It wouldn't really make a difference for the living. If I don't take them, they're just stranded here, in a sort of limbo.
"You ever tried to stop it before? Death?"
Metaphorically speaking, I am Death. But no, I haven't.
"Why not?"
Silence fell on us after the question. I didn't have a legitimate answer for it, but something about the idea of it never sat right. I'd wanted to, sure. Who could look suffering parents in the face and not want to bring back their child? Or a child, their parents? But I never did. I don't know if you even picked up on any of this, but you changed the subject after a little while.
You finally fell asleep as light started to slip through the cracks of your blinds, and I was left to wonder about you. Why try to kill yourself to talk to me? How did such a silent, stoic child become the apathetically curious creature I saw that day? You didn't even mention your dead sister. What was it that you gained from that night that made it worth your self-harm? Instead of simply snapping away to my next soul to lead, I opted to walk out, at least out of the apartment.
It was strange how little there was, where you lived. If you had left that day and never came back, the landlord might have doubted you were even there to begin with. No pictures, no mementos, no decor, and hardly even any clothes. In hindsight, it was kinda creepy to go back and look in your closet. But still, the sight had me thinking back on that day you first saw me. There your sister layed, limp in a hospital bed, surrounded by a wailing family. Yet, there you were against the wall, watching. Your family, your sister, and finally, me. You were invisible, lurking in the blind spot outside of that circle of grief. Your eyes drifted, processing the loss, until they fell on me, the taker. As I left, you finally let a tear spill. A tear nobody saw, or at least, nobody living.
I compared it again and again to the you I saw in that apartment. Unfiltered, unafraid to speak your mind, yet sensitive to my own sensibilities. Ones that I never knew I had. You only appeared to be numb to the concepts of mortality you asked about. But I saw a sincerity in your sleeping face, one troubled by my own lack of answers. "Not even Death knows why he kills." It was written all over your face. And it was true. That "why not" stumped me every time I'd thought back to it. Why can't I? Why wouldn't I?
I never got a satisfying answer to that question, but now I know for sure that I'll never try it. I've never been to a funeral before, save for the ones that, ironically, people died at. I guess you made way for a lot of firsts for me. First time speaking out loud to the living. First time getting stumped by a human. First time feeling like a human, or at least, what I think it feels like to be human.
Last week, when you "called" for me, I was still catching up with the work I had made for myself taking those hours off with you. Not to blame you, I'm the one that broke my own rules. I wanted desperately to break them again when I saw you, but it didn't look like you were interested. In seeing your cold body in that tub, your apathetic gaze towards me, reminding me of our first meeting once again, I decided not to try anything. I wanted to explain myself, and apologize, and try to put you back and talk again. I was dying to feel alive again. But I collected myself, reminded myself. I am Death.
