A Brush With Death

The fragility of the human body is something you never really consider until you’ve brushed shoulders with death.

It’s interesting, how rarely we think about it, yet it waits for us our entire lives — biding its time with the patience of a baobab tree. A slippery step at a bar, a car that is yet to roll off the assembly line, a bullet manufactured years before you were born, a person who will be born decades after you… Moments. Moments that have been lingering in a waiting room from the day we were conceived, and we’ll never know when or how they’ll find us, but they will. Inevitably.

Three days ago I had a dream that I would die that day. I saw the entire thing play out from the perspective of what I believe was myself as a ghost. Usually, my dreams mean absolutely nothing. I’ve had dreams where I was a news anchor who forgot how to speak on live television, or where I was a pot of pudding that no one wanted to touch. The absurdity ranges and it never ceases to amuse me.

But sometimes, very rarely, I’ll have a dream that doesn’t quite feel like a dream. A premonition of sorts — a sibling’s injury, my grandmother’s passing, the winner of a reality show that’s not yet aired... Like Deja vu, with the added twist of being able to predict certain events, but never prevent them.