The word clairvoyant can be literally translated to mean 'see clearly'…clearly this is a joke, although I'm technically a "precog".
The future depends on many things and any one of these things shifting infinitesimally can send the future into a thousand different possibilities, a thousand alternate universes, and I'm supposed to keep track of this.
The future comes to me in bits and pieces – sometimes many bits and pieces and I'm able to cobble together enough of a picture to give me insight into the decisions that must be made. Other times there are scarcely enough bits to make much of a piece of anything, and then there are the rare occasions that it's clear what must be done.
Knowing the future without any context poses somewhat of a problem but glimpsing a future without any of the people in my present terrifies me, which is why I'm here on hands and knees underneath a 150 year old oak tree burying a time capsule.
Something is coming. don't know what, when or how, but no matter what I do, no matter what decisions I make from tonight onwards, the future comes out the same; I'm on my knees in this exact spot, except the oak is nothing but a stump. My hands tear through earth and roots, and more earth and roots until I get to the metal box, now rusted and gnarled from years of the oak spreading its roots regardless of what may be in its path.
I rock back on my heels and look up at the sky. I am overwhelmed with relief. With grief. Andnd fear. What if the contents haven't survived? Because if they haven't then there's nothing left of me. Nothing to hold on to except memories filed away in a mind that has nothing to do but endlessly flip through them as if doing so will bring everything back to me.
Memories hold the threads that keep me pulled together.
I want the tangible. I want the garter I had to wiggle down to my ankle because the southern gentleman in Jasper had balked at the idea of pulling it down my thigh with his teeth in front of 125 guests; I want the barrette I gave to Rosalie that first Christmas; I want Bella's note she wrote to me one Tuesday in English asking me if I'd let Edward know she was going to be late – she'd added "this is pointless isn't it?" at the end because of course, I'd already seen her writing it; I want Edward's sheet music ; bars 15-45 on the 3rd page are smudged because Emmett had knocked over a vase of Chrysanthemums when he and Rosalie gave the new grand a "proper christening". I want Carlisle's journal from 1963 – that was the year he bought Isle Esme and we spent the first of many summers there.
I want the 23 items that I've collected in the past, which is the now , this week, from around our house and hidden away.
But I don't reach for the box.
I've had that vision 27 times in the last 15 years and each time it ends before I even pull the relic from its grave. I have no idea if the pieces of the only life I've known will make the passage of time.
I need to know things.
The unknown is something I left a long time ago; the known was the only thing that kept me from rampaging through the countryside feeding on any human unlucky enough to cross my path.
Jasper was the first vision I've had that I can remember , and the promise of him didn't come till 14 months and 89 corpses after I'd opened my eyes underneath, coincidentally, the boughs of an oak tree, with not one notion of who I was, where I was or how I'd gotten there.
Those first months were violent; full of want and need and thirst. I lived by instinct, my compass the thump-thump-thump of the nearest beating heart. I had no idea what I was; I had no interest in it. I was just fragment of something that simply reacted and caused chaos in its wake.
In the 14th month Jasper emerged from the midst of the bloodlust, along with the idea of love and compassion and a glimpse of there being more out there than just blood and death.
It would be another 27 years before he walked into my life; that's a long time to be waiting for something to hold onto in a world that is familiar and yet alien. But those years prepared me in ways only familiar to a recovering addict; they were a trial and a pardoning, a lesson in failure, humility and perseverance.
By the time he strolled into the diner that Wednesday afternoon I had tempered all need except for the need to be a part of something more than just me.
I need to preserve things because they keep me firmly in my head and away from the animal inside. The daily reminders of familial bonds are what tie me to our way of life, which is why memories are so important to me.
I don't drag Rosalie or Bella out to shop because I want a new dress. I do it because I'm their sister, and it's what sisters do.
The photo albums that line the bookshelves in my bedroom aren't there because I enjoy photography; they're there because I feel the need to capture each and every moment that I possibly can.
Christmas, 4th of July, Halloween. Weddings, birthdays, anniversaries are all opportunities to mark the passage of time with rituals that are unifying.
I keep hoping that I'll stop having the vision. Even now as I dig, the box laying next to me awaiting its internment, I hope that somehow my burying it will ward off whatever is coming and I'll never have a reason to dig it up.
Because without our ties, without the products of what is real and good and true, we're just individual fragments, randomly colliding in a vacuum of chaos.