It started when I was a little girl. At first, glimpses, flashes, but as I grew older, it grew stronger. By four years old I could see the numbers floating above people heads. It didn't mean anything to me, not at first. At age six I could see how the people would die, the numbers grew. First the date they died, then how much time they had left in chronological order, years, months, days, hours, and minutes. At age seven, I could hardly look at someone without seeing their deaths years down the road. I would try to tell my parents, but they never listened.

Well, they listened after I told the teacher that she would die because a bus would hit her walking home from school. She laughed it off, calling it an overactive imagination. Her obituary came over the television only hours later when I got home, her young smiling face forever memorialized in pictures. They say the bus hit her at such speed that she instantly died. I knew she died slowly, her wounds knocking her near death, heart barely beating, not registering to people taking pulse. Her breathing was shallow, not seen by the naked eye. She was laid under the plastic tarp they used to cover bodies in the street to hide them from public view where she suffocated to death, some near half an hour later.

My parents took notice of me after that. Kept me away from other children, I was taught not to look at people, not to speak, to do what I was told and not to disobey. At nine, they sent me off into the insane asylum, or mental institution as they now call it, one hundred and twenty miles upstate in a secluded area. I was the youngest person there by forty five years. I was kept in a white room, given white clothing, and was specially tutored there, carefully monitored. At ten, my powers took a leap forward, I could now see the deaths and dates of names on paper, or in books. In photographs or just by the voices on the radio.

I learned quickly not to acknowledge any of it. I was kept under mild sedation most of the time, locking me within my own thoughts, going through the motions of life, but never truly living. I did my work, I ate my dinner without complaints, and I slept. I kept away from the other people here, I didn't talk, I didn't fuss, I took my medication without complaint, and I visited the shrink six times a week. I didn't say anything, and he didn't ask questions, just watched and observed me. I wasn't allowed to play with toys, they were a security hazard or something, but I made do with what I had. I grew up quickly, advanced most of my tutoring in the first several years in the institute, they said I was the easiest patient to deal with, and they brought in specialized people to teach me after a while. They were called professors. Specialized people from colleges in the state. All of them were interested in the progress I was making, and many wanted me to be in studies involving the mentally unstable people.

I wasn't mentally unstable. I knew what I had was different, but I wasn't wrong in the mind. I knew that, and my doctors were slowly beginning to realize that as well. All of the medication they had put me on didn't work, even after changing the dosages. I was a medical mystery. Or so they say. All I knew was that I felt like I would live the rest of my days here under careful observation for something I couldn't control, but also something I didn't talk about.

I turned seventeen the week before they told me I was going to be released back to my parents. I had spent eight years in those white walls, everything carefully scheduled out, and being released into a world of color, of choice, frightened me. I lashed out that first day, crying hysterically until they sedated me. I could see the looks of pity, and sorrow upon the nurse's faces as I was being escorted back to my room, numb from the injection one of the doctors had put into my arm. They knew. They knew why I acted this way, what possessed me to lash out. Fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of my parents, of things out of my control. I spent that night in an isolation hold. In the morning I was released for breakfast, I took my medication, I ate silently, and my plastic utensils did not make noise on the white plastic tray. I was escorted to the showers, where I showered quickly, dressing myself and drying my hair with a towel. I spent the rest of my day in my room.

I had little that actually belonged to me. Several books, three sets of identical white clothing, and a pair of white sneakers that were gently worn in. The day I was sentenced to leave my white haven and brave the harsh colorful world outside it had rained. Hard. The roads were slick with mud, the hard packed dirt had found itself caked in a thick layer on the black rental car that was standing in idle right outside the front of the building. My clothing and only four of my books were in a small white backpack, everything would be washed, cleaned, and re purposed to someone else, my room currently being sterilized by a janitor working too hard for the meager salary he earned. He always smelt of lemon citrus and peppermint gum. His aging face scrunched into a frown as he often scrubbed a spot on the floor over and over again to get the scuff mark off the floor someone had left while walking the hallways going to or from somewhere.