I barely remember the first time I died.
I was eleven and my family was driving to visit my grandparents during the holidays. The weather was crappy and the roads were bad, but my dad based a lot of his self-worth on being a badass who never had to compromise for the situation, so he was probably barreling through at ten over the speed limit. I was in the back, completely absorbed in my Nintendo DS, so I don’t even know what hit us. There was just a lot of noise and the world spun around and then I was suddenly standing in front of my bathroom mirror earlier that same day, brushing my teeth.
I don’t even remember pain, so I must have died almost instantly. Those are the good ones.
I didn’t tell anyone about what happened. I was scared they’d think I was crazy. I was so damn tense during the whole trip when we got on the road again, but there’s a butterfly effect thing at play and just knowing about the crash was enough to change things so it didn’t happen again. A car accident is a precision event and a few seconds makes a world of difference.
Eventually I convinced myself that it was all just a really weird dream and I moved on from it.
My next death was six years later, when I discovered I am allergic to sesame. I was hiking with some friends and someone gave me a sesame cracker when we stopped for a snack. Cue my throat closing up and seven panicking teenagers trying to give me the heimlich. I remember Brian suggesting they should try to cut a hole in my neck and stick a straw in it, like he saw on TV. I had such a crush on Brian, but he was kind of an idiot.
I suffocated before they came to an agreement. Suffocation is one of my least favorite deaths. There’s a kind of panic involved that hits right in the lizard brain.
Anyway, I stopped breathing and then suddenly I was in my bathroom that morning, putting on some very subtle eyeliner so that Brian would think I had nice eyes but didn’t wear makeup.
Naturally, I flashed right back to the crash when I was eleven. Once could be a nightmare, but twice? I was freaked out for weeks. My parents wanted to put me in therapy because my behavior was so weird. They thought I was on drugs. It was the most attention they paid to me in years, and it was not welcome, so I kept the experience to myself again and made a point of putting on a brave face and trying to act normal.
If you act normal long enough, it starts to sink in. I didn’t exactly forget about my two deaths, but they stopped looming so large in my mind after a while. I kind of let it go, until I drowned at twenty.
This one was my fault. I was sloppy drunk at a party on a friend’s boat. Or a friend-of-a-friend, really. With my parents’ divorce and my dad’s cancer, I wasn’t in a great place mentally back then, so self-destructive was my norm. I was still nominally in college, but I hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom in a while. I saw the bottom of a lot of solo cups, though. The ceilings of a lot of guys’ bedrooms, too, if I’m being brutally honest. I didn’t give a damn.
I fell off the boat and I was drunk and disoriented and the water was cold, so even though I’m not a bad swimmer, I drowned. Salt water drowning isn’t exactly pleasant, because it takes a while, but it’s better than fresh water drowning. Fresh water drowning burns.
I found myself a few hours earlier, doing my hair over the sink in my dorm room before I went out that night. Staring at myself in a mirror.
I only had three data points, but the drowning was an anomaly, because I only went back a few hours, instead of all the way to morning. Three deaths, three leaps back to the bathroom. I had some kind of bathroom-based immortality?
I stayed home and stayed sober that night, trying to remember everything I could about my three deaths and three revivals, so I could find a common thread beyond bathrooms. When I had the allergic reaction, I didn’t go back to the last time I used the bathroom, because there was a disgusting wooden shed by the parking area where I took a piss before we started the hike. I think maybe I used the bathroom at a gas station on the trip when I was eleven, too. And technically, my dorm sink was not a bathroom. It was just a sink. My room shared a toilet and shower with the room next door. I only had a sink and a mirror to myself.
A mirror. That was the key. Every time I came back, I was staring into my own eyes in a mirror. That was my ‘save point,’ like in a video game. I wasn’t sure then, but trust me, I have long since proven it.
I have never deliberately offed myself to test it, but I was already in a reckless phase, and thinking I was immortal did not inspire me to get to a better place. I was already taking risks, but now the risks got stupid. No more helmets. No more seatbelts. No more letting a friend know where I was going when I met up with a strange guy for the first time.
I read once that a guy’s biggest fear when he approaches a girl is that she will humiliate him, and a girl’s biggest fear if she rejects a guy is that he will murder her. I didn’t do much rejecting in those days, so I’m not sure about that side of it, but I did only get murdered once, which seems like a pretty good track record with my body count. He strangled me because I wouldn’t let him do it without a condom. We were both super drunk, which I guess was a factor on his side, but I’ve been with a lot of very drunk guys who didn’t put their hands around my neck when I pissed them off.
I actually went on the date with him again after I flashed back to putting on my makeup beforehand, but the second time around I stabbed him in the throat in the restaurant, and then wouldn’t drop the knife when the cops showed up. Getting shot isn’t that bad, as deaths go. It’s quick, if they have decent aim and don’t spare the bullets.
I ghosted him in the third round, of course. I didn’t have the ability to punish him in a way that would stick, but I felt like one murder each made us even.
I crashed a motorcycle. I fell off a bluff and landed on my head. I dived into a lake that was too shallow for diving. I OD’d, like, twelve times. I got my head bashed on the side of a table in a bar fight that I totally started.
I died a lot and I always woke up to the last moment I made eye contact with myself in a mirror. I got pretty deliberate about my ‘mirror saves.’ I had a mirror hanging on the wall by my front door so that I could give myself a check point every time I left the house. That was the beginning and end of my sense of self-preservation during that time in my life, but it was enough to keep me in the world, no matter how many times I courted death and found it.
Living like you can’t die but kind of want to isn’t something you can do forever. The thill wore off. I didn’t grow a sense of caution, but after a few years I stopped chasing the reaper quite so actively. I think it was around two years after my dad died, and three years after my first drowning, when I realized I hadn’t died in weeks and hadn’t partied in longer. Even my drinking calmed down. I never got entirely sober, but I guess I was one of those people who was drinking for the situation, not for the drink itself, because I cut back without really trying to. I just didn’t feel like doing it any more. I didn’t feel like doing anything. Without real death, it was hard to scrape together a meaning for life.
I did a year of dull moping before I decided to try and use my mirror trick for something good. I was kind of unkillable, so surely I could find a way to use that to help other people and not just hurt myself, right?
I’m not very clever, so you all in the comments can probably come up with way better ideas for how I could have been a superhero, but what I settled on was search and rescue. It wasn’t entirely my idea — Brian worked for a state S&R agency and we had gotten back in touch after I came off my three-year bender, so I heard his scary stories about squeezing through deadly caverns looking for missing kids, or trekking up into the mountains way off the paths to bring back a body that used to be an imprudent rock climber. It was risky work and I could take more risks than anyone. I could go into the caves where no one else dared to follow. I could climb the unstable rock face. I could search the banks of the flood-swollen river and not worry about falling in.
I did fall in once, by the way. Nasty way to die. Remember what I said about fresh water drowning? Combine that with getting beaten and scraped to hell by every bit of debris in the torrent with you. My worst death was cave-diving and getting stuck, back during my reckless phase, but falling in the river was high on the list.
Worth it, though. The next time around I already knew where to find the kid, before the water got too high and took him. I saved that kid and it only cost me one kinda painful death.
I’ve worked in S&R for the past four years. Brian and I got together for a while, and he’s a sweet guy, but it didn’t really work out. We’re still friends.
I don’t die nearly as much as I used to. I took risks when I had to, to save people, but I wasn’t chasing the high so I only took risks when I needed to. It’s some kind of nasty irony that I find myself where I am right now, when I spent three years trying to destroy myself every which way and never fully succeeded.
For the past three days my team has been looking for a fourteen year old girl named Skyler. She was camping with her parents and was gone one morning when they came out of their tent. Our working theory was that she got up to relieve herself in the night and ended up getting turned around when she tried to go back to camp. The woods in the dark can really turn you around, especially if you’re not used to them. Skyler was a city kid.
The weather was not great, but it wasn’t cold enough that we were sure we were looking for a body. For someone so unfamiliar with hiking and camping, Skyler left damned little trail behind her. We spread out from her camp site, did a grid, all the usual stuff. Three days was a long time to be missing a teenager. Little kids sometimes hunker down in weird places and don’t respond like you’d think when you call out for them, but a teen should have the sense to help in her own rescue. I was searching some of the unstable spots at the foot of a mountain we tell people not to climb. It was way off from where Skyler started, but she wasn’t anywhere else and I didn’t want my colleagues poking around such a dangerous place.
To get right to the point, I was too focused on the hunt and not in the habit of looking out for myself, so I guess it’s not a shock that I didn’t notice the drop until I fell in, but I still feel like such a fool. A thirty-foot drop shattered my leg and knocked me senseless.
I found Skyler, though. Poor kid. She had probably been dead since the day she went missing, but she survived the fall. I know because she seemed to have made an effort to check her own injuries, using a hand mirror she must have had in her pocket. I was dazed and hurt and not expecting a damned mirror at the bottom of a pit, so I looked right at it before I knew any better.
Eye contact. Save point. The worst thing I have ever done, and I will be paying for it forever.
My leg is very badly broken and I guess there’s some internal bleeding, because I will be dead in under an hour. Ask me how I know this…
Spare me your suggestions on how to save myself. I don’t have enough reception for a phone call, but I do have internet, off and on, so of course I have tried calling for help. No one can get to me in time. God knows Brian has tried, at least a dozen times now.
I’ve also sent goodbyes to my friends and family, on previous runs. It feels kind of pointless since it just gets wiped away every time I die and wake up next to Skyler, staring into her mirror.
This time I’m sharing my story here, in case it helps anyone else. I have no idea if the mirror trick only applies to me or if this is how it goes for everyone. How would you know, unless you have ever died and come back? I also don’t know if it’s just me resetting and I leave behind the original timeline in some parallel universe, or if I’m taking everything with me. I guess if it’s the latter, this message is no good to anyone, because it won’t last beyond my death.
Maybe I just want someone else to know, finally. I’ve never told anyone about what happens to me. It’s my thing, and tied up intimately with a very dark time in my life, so I have never wanted to share it, but now it’s my doom and I don’t want to be alone with it anymore.
Every time I die, I go back to the last time I looked myself in the eyes. Maybe you will too. Maybe you should pay attention to those moments when you really confront yourself in a mirror, because if you’re very, very unlucky, it could end up leading you to hell.
Edit: I found Annie’s phone - Brian.