#lark!!!!

You’re not yet seven when you first think Oh. This is how I’ll die.

Water surges against you and you don’t know how to swim. You were waiting for your father and brother, having been told explicitly to stay away from the raging river. You didn’t listen, got too close and fell in. You’re drowning in a river you don’t recognize and you’re certain this is how you’ll die.

(You don’t, of course. Your father spots you, and in a rare show of selflessness, he jumps into the river after you. The current has kept you stuck between two rocks and that’s what saves you, what allows your father to reach you. He pulls you out, hands strong as he holds you against him. You feel loved and safe in his arms then. It’s the last time you do.)

It’s not the only time you have that thought though. You have it a thousand times when you are twelve. First, when you realize something was after you. Then, for every second you spend in an alternate dimension. You think it as you’re strapped to a library wall, vine shoved down your throat.

(You’re not wrong in that case. You do die, heart stopped, breath failing. But your mom finds you, crosses into this other dimension after you and a man breaks the ribs caging your heart to force it to start again. You die, but you survive.)

A year later, you think it again, trapped inside your own conscience as you watch something else control you. C-L-O-S-E-G-A-T-E, you manage to tap out, fingers tapping against the chair your body is tied to. It’s the only way to stop the monster that’s controlling you, but you know the consequences. You know it would mean killing you. You’re prepared.

(Again, you survive. Your mother and brother are hell-bent on saving you, and they strap you to a bed and cook you in a makeshift oven, and when that’s not enough, Nancy Wheeler stabs you with a fire poker just as your insides are also lit aflame. The monster lets you go, just in time for El to close the gate and kill anything it claimed.)

You think it many times later. Hiding in a mall from a towering abomination. Pressed up against a wall as a shoot-out happens in your home. Standing back in that alternate dimension, feeling everything aim for you. You think it as you kill the mastermind and you feel your own heart stutter as his slows.

(You don’t. Your heart beats on after his stops, your sister’s arms wrapped around you as you both laugh in relief. It’s over, she says as she all but collapses against you, spent from months of constant fighting. It’s finally over.)

It’s years later, and the thought hasn’t crossed your mind since, but you’re in the safety of your home, staring at the calendar counting down the days until your twenty-first birthday and you realize, you hadn’t planned on living this long.