Consumption

Life isn’t circumstantial. Time’s arrow follows a path without divergence, the threads of our lives woven together to lead us into an invisible predetermined future where our actions have already been decided under the guise of freewill. Despite this, people still believe that they are in control of their own destiny, possibly because of the supposed ambiguity of a future they don’t see. Due to this uncertainty, the power of precognition is considered a gift when it should be dismissed. Within an unchanging future, this ability only acts as a confirmation or denial of peoples’ fears, as life is inflexible within its already interweaved fate. What is worse – living without knowing the future, or being aware of what’s coming without holding the power to change it? That is the one question that, with all my powers as a seer, I have never been able to answer.

Until you.

I have lived a thousand lives through other people, and yet you were unlike anyone I had ever seen. Aged beyond your years, the loose and winkled skin of your gaunt face provided the image of a once beautiful woman rapidly emaciated, leaving a feeble husk in its wake. Despite this your grip on my hand was strong and your gaze steady, a stark contrast to the weak watery fidgets of your elderly parents. You were sick – I didn’t need any ‘gifts’ to see that you were dying. Based on your seemingly exasperated expression at your parents’ desperate pleas for me to look into the future and see if you’d be okay, I doubt you did either. I remember wondering whether they knew you were dying and were simply in denial, or if they were truly blind to your obviously deteriorating condition.

Leading you and your parents to my tent, I watched as you deftly ignored their continuous muttered complaints about the loose dewy grass and wildflowers sticking to their pristine shoes, focus shifted from you to the open field we stood upon. You gracefully wiped your shoes on the small mat outside the unzipped door and stepped inside, your parents following shortly behind as they trailed grass and droplets of water across the tent’s groundsheet. I sat you down on the rickety wooden chair across from me and took your thin hands in mine, closing my eyes and focusing on the contact between our hands as your future started to materialize before me. The threads were short, the tapestry of your life spelling out a swiftly approaching death. Investigating the end’s intricate embroidery, I could see you in a grassy field dotted with spring wildflowers. You were laying down with an undistinguishable figure holding your limp hand as the White Plague consumed you, leaving nothing but an ashen corpse behind.

When I disclosed what I had seen your mother went pale, almost rivalling your own ghostly skin tone, and promptly fainted, hitting the ground of my tent with a resonating thump. Your father was little better, his face turning an ugly shade of red as he roughly grabbed me by my shirt collar, threatening all forms of violence due to my apparently inaccurate vision. I saw you rise out of the corner of my eye, sighing at your father’s behavior as he continued to scream obscenities in my face. Sending me a thin-mouthed smile, you apologized for their dramatic performance and promptly took your father by the ear, ignoring his outraged sputtering, and grabbed the arm of your now conscious mother. With a surprising amount of elegance you dragged them out of my tent, disappearing from view as your parents continued their undignified whining.

You were an oddity, which within itself was weird. After all the people I had seen, and all the lives I’d lived through them, unique experiences were something that never happened. People typically only seek me out in times of great strife when they are trying to implausibly deny a future they know is coming. Because of my ability of precognition people often act as if I was the one who had woven their fate, eager to pass the blame for their misfortune onto the one who had confirmed what they already knew. I had seen dramatic anguish like your mother and blinding rage like your father. Cold acceptance, denial, terror, any and all possible reactions conceivable. But you? You were indifferent – an emotion I didn’t think possible when relating to one’s impending fate. It was refreshing, and within that moment seeing your apathy made me feel as though we were the same. Not accepting of the future, as even without our approval the threads of our destiny will stay unchanging, not yielding or loosening to any person’s desire.

A sudden echoing hoot broke me out of my spiraling thoughts. Stepping out of my tent, the full moon provided a pale washed-out light that allowed a dusky foreboding shadow to trace the ground, caused by the large barn owl gliding overhead. There was something uniquely beautiful about the owl’s features - pitch-black eyes, flickering with reflected light, and the ghostly white feathers luminated in the moon’s shine through each graceful movement providing an almost celestial appearance to the otherwise common animal. As the owl disappeared into the glistening night sky, I couldn’t help but think of you.

The next time I saw you was on the waning moon. Your eyes were sunken and circled with black, skin a dull pale tint with the only colour coming from the small flecks of blood around your mouth. A white crochet shawl was placed on the damp ground on which you were sitting, preventing the loose grass from collecting on your petticoat and tightly bound corset. Upon seeing me you slowly rose from the ground and placed your hands on your chest, apologizing for your parents’ previous unsightly behavior. That wasn’t what I had been anticipating, though I guess by then I should have predicted that you would avert my expectations. I remember thinking that you were beautiful, your pale skeletal figure and dark ringed eyes providing a lovely contrast with your elaborate clothing and barley curls adorned with fragrant white carnations. You looked like an ethereal woman – an old-world nymph who was brought into the current time, so out of place and yet perfect within the open field outside my tent.

I brought you inside and set you down in the seat across from mine. The sharp whistling of my copper kettle over the gas fire was the only noise within the confined space, your serene gaze piercing my back as I poured tea into two chipped cups. You thanked me for the tea, even though it was probably nowhere near what you were used to, and inquired about my life. You cared about what I had to say and shared about yourself in return. The only child of wealthy parents, though you often felt as if you were the one taking care of them due to their immaturity. You had been sick for a long time, dying from the consumption disease that had plagued our country for years. Oscar Wilde was your favorite emerging poet, you loved cloudless spring nights, and you claimed that the tea I made was the best you ever had. There was an effortless sophistication that you carried yourself with, not damaged by your continuous cough that was often tinted with flecks of blood or the slight wheeziness in your voice as you talked to me. In a short while, or what felt as such, the sun had started to rise, causing you to leave under the fear of your parents’ catching an empty bed. The barely visible red and orange hues of the lightening horizon caused a shimmering outline of your silhouette as I watched you leave, not returning to my tent until you had completely faded from view.

Maybe it was the grace and kindness you expressed in the face of illness, or your apathy towards a future you couldn’t change, but I felt myself drawn to you. I can only assume you felt the same, as after that first night I could always expect your appearance once the sun had set. Your emergence from the deep shadows at the turn of night was as clockwork as your disappearance once the first hints of light had crossed the east skyline.

The clearest passage of time could be seen through your health’s gradual decline. As the weeks turned into months my vision started coming to fruition, your appearance continuing its metamorphosis into the fading woman in that spring field. Your hands, once so steady, were fragile and twitchy within my own. The darkness surrounding your sunken eyes only seemed to deepen each day, sharply contrasting against the ever-sickly paleness of your emaciated body, the illness seemingly consuming you through your worsening skeletal frame. And yet, within this change, you stayed the same. You were still kind and curious, elegant to a fault despite the blood that so often spotted your mouth and clothes. I knew that with each passing day your time with me was coming to a close. I found myself thinking back to your parents – would they have been as terrified as I was, or had the time since your future was told allowed them to mellow out into a sad acceptance? They say that time heals all wounds, though the opposite seems to be true for me. When I first saw your future I was indifferent, as back then you were only an unfortunate face in the crowd holding a fate of death that could have been foretold without my powers of precognition. With each passing day, your ghostly skin luminated in the moonlight, I felt my dread grow, despite knowing that such feelings will bring you no relief from your illness. Every interaction with you was tinted with terror, even as you loved me without reservation. There was no fear in your eyes as you placed white carnations in my hair, no melancholy as you complimented the mediocre tea I made you every night.

Perhaps it was my connection to you that makes your death so tragic. It made me selfish, as I know that if I was given the opportunity to save you, to give your fate to someone else, I would do so in a heartbeat. Their suffering wouldn’t matter as long as you were with me. You wouldn’t want that, however. Even before we met you had made peace with your looming mortality, aware that there was nothing that could be done, that no pleading or crying would loosen the threads of your future and allow them to rearrange into the life you deserve. I wished for so many things – that I had met you earlier, that your illness would slow down, that we could have had more time together. Fate had already been decided before I met you, so why did I wish things were different? Why do I torture myself with ‘what-ifs?’ when there was nothing I could have done to change the way things played out? Why am I the one hurting, when you’re the one dying?

Beauty had enveloped the world the night you died. The new moon had just started its ascendance, warm sunset tones bathing the field in an ethereal glow as the colours faded across a cloudless sky. It was slightly earlier then your usual arrival, where your figure would be shrouded in the white irradiating light of the moon rather than the sunset’s vibrant shades. You smiled at me, a small and weak upturn of your lips, and in that moment I knew you had become the woman in my vision.

The sky was clear and the spring air was sweet with newly bloomed flowers, the world alive with the vibrant humming of honey bees and the fireflies’ illuminated movements. Forget-me-nots and dandelions dotted the open field on which we stood, and you were careful not to step on them as you moved closer to me. It was like the world knew you loved these clear spring nights and decided to accommodate your death through this stunning display, though I knew that wasn’t the case. This weather, like your death and all the events preceding it, had been woven into the tapestry of your life long before either of us were born. I had seen this weather in my vision of you, and yet I couldn’t help but feel as if it was inappropriate. You might have loved this type of night, but the world should have grieved your passing; raged a horrific thunderstorm or brought forth a dangerous blizzard to destroy the beauty surrounding us, yet the world kept peacefully moving as if unaware of the tragedy within it.

You laid down in the field of wildflowers, uncaring about the grass and dew clinging to your clothes. I fell down next to you, gently grabbing your hand in mine as we laid side-by-side. The cyclone of thoughts in my head, the horrific dread that chilled my body, seemed to slowly loosen as we were together.

Within an unexpected serenity we laid in the damp grass as the moon slowly traversed the clear night sky, knowing that by the time it crossed the west horizon you would be gone. Your grip on my hand was weak as you gazed up at the moon, a small smile on your lips as a barn owl flew overhead, and I have never known peace like in that moment. Whether or not being blind to the future was better didn’t matter, as within your final moments you were peaceful – surrounded by the new life of spring as yours faded away. Even if I wish things had gone differently, that I had loved you without fear like you did me, I knew you didn’t have any regrets. In that field, surrounded by the beauty of the world with your hand in mine, you were happy.

For all my powers as a seer, I have never once looked into my own future. As your hand went limp in mine, I wasn't sure what came next for me. I might rise from the dewy grass the moment the first hints of daybreak colour the sky, or maybe I will stay with you. Our bodies may lie there for hours or weeks, slowly decomposing and feeding the world around us, the flowers fertilized and animals fed by our intertwined corpses. Either way, I have found my home with you.