I couldn't explain what was happening anymore. These feelings never leave me alone. I can't control it. I can't control myself. I wished I'd never been born. None of the chaos would have happened. My family would be whole. They would have had normal lives, and maybe half of the horrific things that happened because of my existence wouldn't have happened. Nothing good followed me. Only one thing did. Death.

They began as dreams. As a kid I used to think it was a gift. I thought my ability to fall asleep and see something that would happen one day in front of my own eyes was a blessing from angels. I remember being in seventh grade and having a test in front of me. I knew every answer, but I hadn't studied whatsoever. I didn't usually do that, but the night before had been horrible. I had lost my childhood dog. I hadn't even glanced at a list of words I needed to know how to spell. Words I had never looked at before or used in conversation. Somehow, I knew everyone. After the test we graded each other's papers. The teacher grabbed her chalk and wrote every word on the blackboard. I realized I knew why I'd known the words. I had seen them before. Two nights before, I saw the words being written on the board in a dream.

It was just a cool thing that happened sometimes. I dreamt of things and they came true. It was a rare thing. It happened every few months. I never knew it was going to happen. Some dreams were nonsense, others ended up being real. How could I tell them apart? Well… for starters I knew my Phantom of the Opera dreams definitely weren't visions. I knew my chances of ever owning a Porsche Carrara were slim to none, so that had to have been a dream.

The dreams went from being harmless, to dreams of horrific things. When I was fifteen, I had a dream that my boyfriend got in a car accident. Not like any dream. I saw his eyes drift to his radio. Back to the road. Back to the radio, where they stayed just a little too long. I saw every detail of his death, heard every scream from the metal of the semi's front end crumpling the hood and front end of Braden's Civic. The airbag sensor had been clipped by the wreck. Without the airbag, his head continued with the momentum. His head smashed the steering wheel. I watched as his body was crushed by the semi's cab driving over the car. The same thing happened when my best friend committed suicide senior year and when my cousin was stabbed the death in a drug deal gone wrong my freshman year of undergrad. And then there was the dream.

The one dream I had over and over again. I couldn't see. I was cold. It was like the life was leaving my body. Something was holding me between the worlds. It was a voice. A man's voice, screaming out. I could never make out what he was saying or why he was saying it. As I opened my eyes in the dream I could only see something on the ground near me, a tattered leather bound journal. It had cards sticking out and the pages were worn. The book had fallen open to a page, and I felt like I needed to grab it. The book was too far out of my reach. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. I was dying.

"Miss?" a calm woman's voice asked.

I mentally shook myself. I glanced up from my drawing of the journal on the sketchbook in front of me. "I'm sorry…I get…so, uh…caught up in my drawings. What did you ask?" I answered.

The older woman with a neat bun, and a polite smile replied, "The library is about to close."

"Oh, sorry. I'll get my stuff."

She smiled and then walked back to the receptionist's desk.

I let out a sigh. I took one more look at the drawing of the journal. It never changed. I always draw the journal from the same angle, open to the same page. I couldn't read the letters with the angle the book laid in front of me. I closed the sketchbook and slid it into my backpack. I tossed my bag over my shoulder and headed to the door. The night was dark. Heat lightning crackled in the distant sky. I could feel the electricity. I pulled my hood over my head and walked in the direction of my dorm room.

I pulled my earbuds from my pocket and plugged them into my phone. With the buds in my ears and Led Zeppelin buzzing through my head, I made the rest of my walk back to my dorm building. I swiped my ID card at the door and opened the glass door. I swiped my card again in the elevator, and jammed the sixth floor button. The elevator jerked as it rose a few floors. The metal doors opened and I stepped onto the old blue carpet that covered the hall floor. I walked down the hall, glancing up at a flickering light. Cheap ass university. We pay $40,000 a year to live in dorms that are never up kept, computers that have been on campus since 2003, and the slowest wifi I've ever experienced. It's still better than Michigan. Anything's better than- stop. Stop thinking about that. I slid my key in the lock at my door and slammed it behind me. I flipped the lock back over and put my bag on the table. The flashing clock on the microwave said 11:34. I looked down at my watch, reading 9:13. Probably another damn power surge.

"Lindsay, I'm home," I shouted into the dark apartment. I flipped on the lights in the living room and dropped my tired body on the couch. I'd spent way too long in the cadaver lab this afternoon. I hated being around human corpses. I wasn't in med school to learn how to stand over dead bodies all day. I wanted to learn how to save lives. These people had been dead for years and should have been buried long ago. I just wanted to look at something else, anything other than another dead body.

I picked up the remote and started flipping through the channels. General Hospital, ER, Sex Sent Me to the ER… Jesus Christ. Can I never escape? Lindsay probably still had my collection of Once Upon a Time. I was a few seasons behind at this point. "Hey, Linds? Do you still have my discs?"

Silence.

"Linds? Are you still awake?"

Oh great, she's been drinking with the frat boys again.

I got up from the couch. "Lindsey, I swear to god if I have to clean up your vomit from the grout of my bathroom tiles one more time, I will-"

I froze. I'd smelled that smell way too many times in the past few weeks. I took a tense step toward her door. It was cracked open. I reached a hand out and pushed the door. The hinges screeched as the white panel door swung open. All I could see was blood dripping from bright pink fingernails hanging over the side of the bed. I resisted a scream. I HAVE TO GET OUT. If there's a killer in my apartment I have to get out. I turned and grabbed my bag from the table and sprinted down the hallway. I repeatedly smashed the down button on the elevator. Come on come on come on! The lights in the hall started flickering again. Oh god damn it, what the hell is going on?

I ran to the stairs and shoved open the door. I took the stairs down two at a time and opened the emergency exit door from the stairs. I was immediately hit with large rain droplets. The rain soaked into my hair and my jacket as I sprinted down the back alley leading to the campus police office.

White hot pain coursed through the side of my head. Everything went black.