I Dare You To Read This Book.

My life is not my own.

u/Cheeseanonioncrisps1d
When I was seventeen I got in a car accident. I was driving drunk and lost control. The car swerved and crashed into a concrete wall. Three cans of beer and seven vodka shots and god knows what else had persuaded me that I didn't need a seatbelt– I went flying forwards, smashed the windscreen and hit the wall headfirst, snapping my neck and killing me instantly.
Except, that didn't happen.
In the split second before bone hit brick, I heard a little voice, soft and gasping, like an old man on his last legs,: "Twelve years ago you saved a life, do you want to trade?" Don't ask me where it came from– I wasn't exactly in a position to look around– I had just enough time to think "yes" before it all went back and, suddenly, I was a little kid again.
The memories came flushing back amazingly quickly– every sight, every sound, every smell brought on memories so vivid that I could almost have mistaken them for hallucinations.
I was five, it was September, on a Tuesday afternoon just after school had finished. I got full marks in my spelling test and my Mum had offered to buy me a chocolate bar– a Mars bar, always my favourite as a kid– and now I was standing on the pavement eating it while she unlocked the car. There was another woman, a few feet away, also unlocking her car– but she was having more trouble. She seemed to be trying to juggle a week's shopping, her mobile phone (which was ringing very loudly), her car keys and a rather chewed looking teddy bear, whose owner was dancing around her feet.
That little girl, I remembered, as clear as if it had happened not ten minutes ago, was about to look over at the other side of the street. A robin redbreast was going to land there and she was going to toddle off towards it, not noticing that car (a bright yellow one that was the only reason my younger self had been looking in that direction at all– I'd never seen a yellow car before) that was coming down the street. In exactly six seconds I would shout out "hey!", the mother would look round, drop everything– making a beautiful splash as the eggs and milk in her back hit the ground and exploded– and grab hold of the child before she stepped out in front of the car.
Five seconds.
Four seconds.
Three seconds.
Two seconds.
One.
My lips wouldn't move. My vocal chords seemed tied as I watched that girl toddle out into the road and the heard the tires screech and the mother's scream. It was deeper than I would have thought– not high pitched like in a horror movie but husky and primal. My mother took hold of me and hugged me close to her chest the moment she heard the tires, so that all I could see was the black and white pattern on her shirt, but she couldn't shut the scream out. It entered through my ears, rattled my bones and made my heart beat fast.
I'm not sure what happened next but, all of a sudden, I was back in the car, driving along, back in control, perfectly sober. I drove home in complete silence, went to bed and stayed there until noon the next day, telling my parents I had a hangover. It wasn't a total lie, I'd woken up with a killer headache.
I kept trying to make sense of what had happened, feeling guilty about and then feeling guiltier about not feeling more guilty. If what had happened last night really had happened, then a child– barely a toddler, for god's sake!– had died for me. But, then again, it had happened twelve years ago. It probably would have happened anyway, if I hadn't been looking over there, or if I'd been a few seconds too slow calling out, or if the mother had chosen not to look up– more and more, as time went on, it seemed like I wasn't really to blame. I hadn't pushed the kid in front of the car, after all, and I was seventeen and I was alive– who was to say that my life for the girl's life wasn't a reasonable trade? Who was to say that it wasn't meant to be like this all along?

That was over twenty years ago and, since then, I've achieved a lot. I've got a nice job, nice friends and, six years ago next June, I met the woman of my dreams. All thanks, I suppose, to that little girl. I googled her obituary a few weeks after it happened, hoping against hope that I'd imagined the whole thing. Her death was described as a tragic accident– just an accident, not a murder.
Don't think that I've gotten away with it though. Every year I live, every person I meet, the list gets longer.
The doctor who diagnosed my kidney problem.
The electrician who fixed my faulty wiring that, apparently "couldn't have gone much longer before the whole bloody house burned to the ground."
The young woman in the shop who pointed out that the meat I was about to buy was way, way out of date.
Sometimes I wonder, how many more of them are there? Does the Prime Minister count, for not starting a war that could result in my death? How about my year two teacher who taught me not to touch sockets with wet hands? Or what about the people who saved my parents lives before I was born?
How many people are there in the world, at any given moment, who could suddenly find themselves at Death's door and hear that little voice asking if they want to trade my life for theirs. How long before I'm yanked out of existence in favour of somebody who, years ago, indirectly saved me from dying in a plane crash?
Maybe that's my punishment for taking the life of that little girl, for taking advantage of life's little known cheat code. The horror of knowing that those people exist. The curse of knowing that my life is not my own.