The Death of a Teenager

She was only seventeen years old and I just met her once. I will never meet her again.

She had had a difficult life, she told me. There were monsters following her, real and imaginary. She was full of fear and anxiety and at times she had been suicidal. But now things were better. She had been helped and those beasts were fading. Life was getting bright and she had woken up to it. She had her hopes and dreams.

“I don’t want to be a victim for the rest of my life,” she said. The rest of her life was two weeks.

It was a car accident. A drunk driver snapped her life away. Hers and her brother’s. Her parents survived.

I only met her once, but her image is haunting me. I don’t want to think about her, but she keeps intruding on my thoughts. “For the rest of your life,” she says.

Why did I meet her? I didn’t know she existed until that day, and two weeks later she didn’t. If my arrival in this foreign town had been delayed just a little, I would never have met her; never ever.

I roam the world; go there, come here. I bump into things, I bumped into her. Time and place encounter each other and produce chance and accident. It’s not supposed to be. Sometimes it is good, often it is bad. Why did I meet her?

She shouldn’t have been in that car. The drunk driver shouldn’t have driven. A moment in history that shouldn’t have happened. A bullet hit a bullet. It had just begun and it was over. It happened.

It happened that I met her. It was a flash of inspiration that I didn’t understand. I still don’t understand.

I’m glad I met her.