The Personal Monologue Of A Deadbeat Teenager
It was easy enough to see that I was a stupid motherfucker. No, really, just ask anyone. I was stupid, I was impulsive, hyperactive, crass, you name it. One of my teachers in the seventh grade even went as far as to call me the "devil's incarnate hooked up to an IV full of coffee." Someone, like you, might tell me not to listen to them, or that "sticks and stones may break your bones, but words may never hurt you." It's bullshit. I've broken bones before. A splintered femur is nowhere near as painful as watching a teary-eyed ex-friend recount the things they hate about you. But, I digress. If you wanted to hear some punk kid mope about their shit life for two hours straight, you'd watch a Lifetime movie. No, I know what you came here for; my life story, but with less of my own personal feelings, and more excruciatingly pretentious descriptions of what the sensation of almost dying feels like.
I have to break some truth to you, however. Even with me being the thing that I was, the near-death experiences (at least, the ones that weren't somehow self-induced) take a major backseat to the drone of day-to-day life. This isn't to mean I don't think about these moments almost all the time, but rather that I'm living a life. A life that includes sleeping, eating, household chores, stubbed toes, awkward doctor's visits, and those weird-tasting burps that contain the withered ghost of last night's dinner. The average human life is about 28,000 days long, and most of them are filled with that. But, as I said before, that isn't what you came here for.
Where do I start?
Maybe I start with the dream. You know those dreams that you get that are surprisingly surreal, beautiful, and subliminally strange? The ones that leave you with a sense of bewilderment, confusion, and a new layer of introspection? Yeah, I didn't ever get those. No, I had to get fucking omens. Why couldn't I have the normal onset of anxiety-induced "I-Arrived-To-School-In-My-Whitie-Tighties" dreams, like most kids? I guess I can't really have things that most other kids have.
My dreams almost always start with the same scene- I'm surrounded by carnage and destruction in a run-down city block. The area looks like it'd been recently nuked; there was more rubble than there was road. Large, twisted chunks of metal are quite literally floating through the air, seemingly pulled by what must be the world's strongest invisible fishing line, towards a caped figure. A beat-up girl in a brick red-jacket wove what looked like pure light of the same color through her fingers, with a desperate look on her face. She kept looking back at me. Innumerable people in uniforms were on the ground, either injured, or just dead in a sickening ring of red liquids and exposed bone marrows. A boy in a flashy blue-and-red spandex bodysuit (I'm not one to judge for this poor fashion choice, I've done way worse) is clutching my arm, a look of defeat and panic across his features. I could never make out his face clearly, but he always had brown eyes. Very big, very sad, very brown. He always said the same thing to me, every damn time.
"Run, Pietro."
And then I'd wake up.
I know that I don't have to take that as a bad omen. I know that I don't even have to take it as anything, really. I'd dismiss this as just some sort of lucid dream stuck on repeat if it weren't for this fact- The average human may live for 28,000 days, but a mutant is lucky if they live even half that many.