Accidents happen all the time. You could step out to water the garden, trip over a toad, hit your head, and die. Life is full of accidents, some are minor and imperceptible, and others are enormous and mark our lives forever.
My life was going great. I finally had a job I loved, a decent salary, I had met a girl named Rachel, and I was assigned to my first mission in space.
"Secure safety cable 1, release safety cable 2" – that's all I had to do. But due to a lapse in attention, I released one safety cable before securing the other. Accident! - "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!"
Perhaps my birth was an accident. When I was young, I used to wonder if I was supposed to have died at birth or something, that my entire existence was a freak of nature and that just the fact of my being alive would cause the world to collapse unprecedentedly. I don't know if I was supposed to be alive or dead by now, but I don't think my existence has been that significant to the human race. Maybe my inattention in securing the safety cables was the universe conspiring to erase me from the map. I detached from the space station to die wandering the universe. I hope I don't suffer much when the oxygen runs out or that I'm already unconscious due to some panic attack when it happens.
I remember one afternoon at the pool, it was just my grandfather and me. He was sixty-nine, and I was still seventeen. It was late afternoon, and my parents were traveling; he was taking swimming lessons and was learning to swim in old age, he had undergone surgery and survived cancer and had started doing things he had never done since then... Swimming was one of them. We were drying off when he slipped on the tiles as slippery as soap, his head hit a corner, and quickly the whole white floor turned red, I remember holding his head and feeling his warm blood dripping through my fingers, I tried to stop the bleeding, but it seemed to have no effect.
"Grandpa?!?" I shouted – "Are you okay?"
"Fine!" he said trying to smile. He must have realized that I was really scared like I had never been in my life.
My hands were trembling. I was still trying to stop the bleeding.
"I'll get help," I said thinking of going to the neighbor.
"No, wait!" He said, holding my hand very tight – "Don't leave me alone."
Then I really understood what was happening.
"And then..." I asked – "How are you really feeling?"
"Never better," he said – "Be strong, because this life..." then he hesitated – "...It's really strange and wonderful."
I hugged him and stayed like that for a long time, saying goodbye. This marked me deeply for the rest of my life, everything I've done since then has been trying not to disappoint him.
Accidents happen all the time, and they are strange and wonderful... Just like life.

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Drifting in the Space of Ramblings
Science FictionAn astronaut lost in space. Dying. Drifting. What will be the last things to pass through his mind before death?