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You would have thought that being blind, I would be able to see nothing, and oh how I wish that was true. Sometimes I see, and what I see would ensure that I would wish to be always blind and see only darkness. How horrible is it to see the dying and be able to do nothing to stop it? In the split seconds before someone around me dies I see them, almost as a remnant of their former selves.
I see them for the length of time they will suffer during death, which I have been able to figure out. But there is no way that I can stop it. I remember the first time that I realized what I could see, and that was a year ago today. I had spent a week with my grandmother and on the last day of my visit, I saw her that entire day. I was petrified because I knew I could not see, and yet that entire day I saw her as clear as day. She died that night of a long-lasting heart illness, and it was a long eight hours before she was declared dead by the doctors. That was my first indication that what I was seeing was not normal, not that there is anything normal about a blind girl seeing. I tried, oh, I tried to change the fact that everyone who I could see died within minutes of my having seen them.
This leads me to tonight, which is the oddest night in my existence. Tonight, my father decided to have a party for all of his closest friends. It was loud and boisterous with all of the people he worked with celebrating the fact that they had made a sale that would make the company flourish for a long time to come. I was walking through the party listening to the cheers and laughs and inappropriate comments from all of his middle-aged friends It was not pleasant as a young girl to listen to, but this was common for the parties that my father would throw. As I was walking through trying to get to the kitchen, all of a sudden in a flash, just as I was passing my father, I saw everyone in the house. It was as if there were no walls, I could see everyone, and it did not matter where they were. Then I realized that it wasn’t quite everyone that I could see, because I couldn’t see the man that my father was talking to. I could hear his voice as he talked to my father, and it was not someone who I had ever met before. Being blind I had learned to distinguish voices and to remember them, and I did not remember his voice. It was a nice-sounding voice, and it seemed so odd that I could not see him just now as I had seen everyone else. Why was he exempt? I thought that it was possible that he was the murderer, and that he would be the one to kill everyone else, but then I had been wrong before, and I hesitated to say anything because I did not want to falsely accuse him, and I knew that whether I said something or not they would all die.
I can’t say that they wouldn’t believe me if I told them that they all were to die, but I can say that in similar situations I had told people what was going to happen to them and they had told me I was crazy. I didn’t think that my father’s business friends would appreciate being told by a ten-year-old child that they were all about to die and that it would all happen in the flash of an eye. I figured that if it were to happen that quickly that I would probably die with them, and I was at peace with that, for I was done with seeing these people that I would have no hope of saving. It would be a welcome relief to die myself, merely so that I would no longer be responsible for the knowledge of who amongst us would live and who would die. This was too large a burden for my young mind.
My father seeing me pass him and pause introduced me to the man, albeit in a very condescending and brusque way that would indicate that he was not pleased I was down there. He had treated me this way for as long as I can remember, and it was as if I were his greatest failure in life. He was always scary, and I tried to avoid him as much as possible, even though he had never touched me. The voice of the man was kind, and even though I could not see him I trusted him for some reason. I knew from my instant sight that many of my father’s friends who I wished to avoid were upstairs so I went outside and the man followed me because he was afraid of me being alone out there late at night. I heard shots being fired and people screaming, and I struggled while he held me back because I knew that my seeing had come true. They were all dying. He threw me onto the ground and threw himself onto me, and in that moment, I knew fear as I never had before.
The man refused to let me go into the house but based upon the shaking that I felt coming from his body I knew that he was as afraid as I was. It seemed like hours but was probably only a couple of minutes when the police arrived and found us there in the yard shaking and trying our best not to be seen by the people who had done this. We were taken in by them to the station and questioned by them for what seemed like hours. Why were we in the yard alone? Why were we not inside? Did we know how this had happened or who would want to do this? The questions were endless, and despite my gift, I was a child. I was a child who now had no one and who had witnessed the death of her father right before her eyes. I was petrified.
No one would tell me what happened that night, because no one is willing to tell children anything, but someday maybe I’ll know what happened that night. Based on the fact that the nice man remained free I assume that he was innocent in the affair and as wrong as this makes me sound, I am glad that I am no longer living with my dad. In the end, I was adopted by my mother’s distant family, and for that I was grateful, but that did not make what I saw go away. I still saw death when I saw at all, and it still terrified me because there was nothing that I could do. And in the end that will be me, seeing death as long as I live.