I am going to die tonight. Maybe it’s completely irrational to say something like that based on a feeling alone, but there you have it. The feeling came like a knot in my stomach, somewhere inbetween 106th Street and somewhere in Manhattan. I can’t quite remember where I got off the subway and back on again. I can’t even remember how many times I did it, north and then south, north and then south - too many times to count, probably.

The odd thing is what I’m thinking about. It should be a big thing, dying. Maybe it will be. Maybe it’ll be like a last gasp before being swallowed into somewhere wholly different. Maybe I won’t even remember any of this bucking of trains and opening of doors.

There’s music playing in Times Square: it’s Chuck, a busker always eery under the flash and glimmer above him. He’s got his trumpet this time, playing a tuneless bit of jazz, music that doesn’t really make any sense. But then, neither did any of this; a life so short and an eternity so long.

I still smelled her on my fingers. I smiled at the thought. How would it hit her after all this time? She’s probably sitting in some apartment in the Bronx painting like she always wanted. Or writing. She wrote me a poem once, and I loved it despite its flaws, or more better, for its flaws. I always find it so hard to love things that seem perfect. They’re too abstract. I prefer concrete things.

My parents. Will they miss me? I suppose. But it’s odd how things tend to go on after like time didn’t just rest in the crook of a story’s arm and reverse entirely, like they barely even happened at all. The events shape us and form us, I suppose, but we go on being shaped and formed: we never stay the same.

I wanted to, once. I was only fifteen, granted, but I thought that I’d stay in that clear time when everything was right, and I though I’d stay there forever. A year later, I was a different person, and though the death remains in the back of my head, I barely ever think of it, to tell the truth. It became part of me, some, but mostly passed through me and turned into a past I seldom revisit.

Didn’t see that one coming. Nope, but then I though everyone lived forever. That was being young. All that aside, I am going to die tonight. I know it. Nothing I do will stop it.

I still smelled her on my fingers, still heard the jazz, still bathed in the electronic ether above.

Of course, I didn’t see that car coming either.

Tags: fiction