my fifth encounter with death

Last time, it happened so fast—no time to even be surprised. I was alive, and then I was dead. I was breathing, and then I was not. I was running so fast I could have been mistaken for a centipede, so many legs and no body. And then I stopped. 

This time it seems to be taking forever. The ground has turned eighteen different shades of brown before finally reaching black, before everything reaching black, and even though I’m not alive enough to see colors or light, I am still slowly, stupidly, painfully, barely alive. 

This time there are prison bars around every part of my brain that I like: my artsy side, my funny side, my logical side. Yet also this time, the most painful parts of my brain are still out in the open: the one that feels. The one that cries. The one that hurts.

That’s how I know that this is the last time. Every other time was painless, easy, and temporary. This time it almost seems as if it will go on forever. And ever. And ever. Until there really is no going back.

My friends used to joke that I was as pale as Death. But that’s only because they’ve never seen Death. They haven’t died five times. 

Death is translucent. When there’s enough light around, he almost looks invisible. The only parts of his body that always stay opaque are his eyes. This is important because he likes to stare. At first, you’ll think it’s weird but kind of sweet, like maybe he actually cares about the lives he’s taking. But once you’ve met him five times, it feels perverse, like his eyes might crawl out of their almost invisible sockets and down your pants. It feels like he might just reach into your body and grab your soul and your dignity, all while staring you right in the eyes. 

It feels disgusting.

The first time I died, Death decided not to take me because I had “too much potential”, as if, in the short time that I was dead, he’d finally recognized the immorality of taking a child’s life. The second time it was because I was “too handsome”. The third time it was because it was within the same week as the second time, and Death was already bored of me. What would he do if we’d have to spend the rest of eternity together? The fourth time, Death looked me in the eyes and told me that one day I would stop being young and sexy (yes, he said ‘sexy’) and I would have to succumb. 

I guess this is the time when I succumb.

When the ground turns black and the pain finally ceases, I am standing once again in a forest, face to face with Death. 

“Hello, again.” The words float out of the gaping, deep inky crater that I have come to recognize as his mouth, although when I first saw him I thought it was a black hole. I was so naive that I thought I had been transported to space; Death doesn’t make much sense in the beginning. 

“Hello,” I mouth, though nothing comes out; for the first few seconds you are in Death’s presence, he is so unbelievable that you cannot speak.

“Looks like I can’t make another excuse for you. Though I have to ask, why are you back so soon?” If you close your eyes and only listen, Death sounds incredibly human. 

“I guess I was just stupid,” I tell him, my voice back. The truth is that I was drunk, that I went hiking with a bottle of vodka and a bunch of friends, and at the top of the mountain - at the bottom of the bottle - I tripped and went all the way down. I guess you could call that stupid. 

“I know stupid people when I see them. If you were that stupid, I would have taken your life a while ago.”

“Maybe you don’t know us as well as you think.” Death’s hands are on my shoulders and I’m reminded of that one science teacher who always liked to touch my shoulders, my waist, the top of my head, and I want to shiver. But Death isn’t cold, so I don’t. 

Death is gripping me so tightly that I feel like I might bruise, like he might burn a hole in my arm. “Do you just long for me so much that you can’t help but die?” I think he is smirking. The gaping cavity that is his mouth has turned from an oval to what looks to me like a disfigured insect, legs and all, tilted to the right.

When I was a kid, I wasn’t the kind of kid who was fascinated by death. I liked action movies and fantasy and even sometimes ghost stories, but I didn’t ever really want to know Death. There was a kid in my kindergarten class named Simon who would play dead on the sidewalk every day, limbs sprawling out every which way until one time he dislocated his arm and had to go to the ER and our teacher made him stop. I wasn’t Simon. 

“I don’t think I really ‘long for’ you,” I say. “Are you even…a species that can be ‘longed for?’”

“I wasn’t talking about that kind of longing. But if you’re offering…” Death smirks again and the insect on his face is so happy I think I might rather live as The Most Hated Person on Earth than spend time with Death. This is why his stare feels so vulgar. 

“I’m literally seventeen.” 

“And I could be a seventeen-year-old too, you wouldn’t know the difference.” 

“I’m a human.”

“I don’t hear you saying you don’t want me.” 

I don’t want him. I want nothing to do with him. I want to pull each of his translucent fingers off, one by one, and shatter them like crystals on the ground, into a million little cloudy pieces. I want to stick my hand into that cavernous mouth and pull out his soul, not the other way around. And after I’ve taken his life, or I guess his lack thereof, I want to leave and forget about him forever.

“Are you gonna take me, or not?” I ask him. He is still staring at me and I know now to look directly into his eyes, where you can kind of see your terrified reflection, rather than look away, where his eyes will always be chasing yours until they ‘give up’ and begin staring at somewhere else on your body. I know that Death pretends that it’s Plan B, that he always tries to look you in the eyes first before looking where he really wants. I know that he’ll tell you it’s your fault for not looking him in the eyes.

I know that he just wants to look at my body. 

“I could take you. I could’ve taken you ten minutes ago. Or…” That insufferable insect smirk appears again in place of the hole. 

“Just take me. Five times is enough, don’t you think? Just. Take me,” I plead. 

Death sighs and tightens his grip on my shoulders. “If you insist.”

I am still in the forest but my mind feels like it’s somewhere else, in another world entirely. There is a hole in my chest that is spouting black blood. In Death’s invisible hand is my soul.

I always thought my soul would look kind of like a dark and smoky heart. But it doesn’t look like that at all. It sparkles like it’s been doused in glitter, and when its last remnants leave my body, I hear Billy Joel singing Piano Man, just like I heard Billy Joel the first time I was drunk at a party, and the time I lost my virginity. Just like I heard Billy Joel when I cried in the hospital and then again at Mom’s funeral, and when I rode my bike off that cliff the first time and everything went black so quickly I didn’t even know I was dead until Death let me go.

Death is no longer staring me in the eyes. This is the end, I think, and this time I look Death in the eyes, and I feel so small and insignificant and so unalive. And when Death speaks again, I think that if my soul had stayed in my body any longer, I might have fallen in love with him. He is tender and gentle and a little bit daring when he lifts my soul up and releases it into the sky. Maybe I am high on death, but I barely even remember how repulsive he was before.

And then I see my eyelashes within focus and the hole in my body gets bigger and bigger and soon, just as Death smiles at me, looking at me in the eyes with love instead of hunger, I wonder if I had previously imagined his faults as they seem invisible now, and I almost tell him No, I don’t want to disappear just yet, but instead, I fall apart, a million little pieces dispersed among the trees.