The first time I saw Raphael die, he jumped off a bridge. I was on one side and he was on the other. There was some traffic between us but not a lot. I knew it was him. He looked over at me - or maybe near me - I wasn't sure at the time if he really saw me at all and then he vaulted himself over the edge. There was a moment before he jumped where I was thinking all the usual thoughts that you get when you see someone you know around town: should I say hi, should I wave, should I give the cool guy nod... those kinds of thoughts. I was probably going to do nothing and just let the moment pass so that next time I really saw him I could tell him that I saw him on the Hawthorne bridge but then he jumped over the edge. Really.
The second time I saw Raphael die he talked to me first. Well really he said something and I didn't say anything. I tried to. I thought about saying something but how can you talk when you see someone that you know is dead? How can you speak to someone that you have spent the last month telling everyone you know about how they jumped off a bridge in the middle of the day on a Wednesday and you knew them from high school but not that well and your life is falling apart because of what you saw but maybe that's just an excuse and you're life needed to fall apart. I was at a street corner downtown looking at my cell phone to check the time and I heard this voice.
"Hey man."
I looked up. It was him. At first I smiled because some part of my brain responded before the message from my frontal lobes screamed across my entire nervous system: this guy is dead - you saw him leap off a bridge a month ago. So I said nothing. He nodded at me.
"How you doing, man? What you been up to lately?" He paused for a response but all I gave him was my useless hand still gripping my cell phone. "Alright. See you around, I guess."
He turned and walked away, stepping close to a building under construction to get out of the rain. He'd taken about four steps and was standing under a gap in the scaffolding when a palette of shingles fell from the fifth story and landed directly on top of him. It didn't stop. The palette smashed him flat. The amazing part was that there was no body. They told me that later when they did the clean up. There was no body, no blood but I watched it fall on his head.
You can imagine how much worse this made things.
Still, it was nothing compared to the third time I saw Raphael die. I was sitting on a park bench, running my fingers through my hair, pulling out strands and throwing them onto the grass. He came up and sat next to me.
"Hey."
I nodded this time. I still couldn't speak but I could nod. It was a good start.
"You alright man, you look terrible."
"I've seen you die twice."
He smiled. "Only believers in death will die." He handed me his cup of coffee and walked into the middle of the park. There, in broad daylight, before an audience of pigeons and myself, he sprinted full out into the road and in front of a bus.
They say they never found a body but I saw him do it. All three times I saw him do it. What's worse is that I know he's going to do it again. I'm falling apart. Things are bad - the worst they've ever been but I know when I see him again it'll be worse still.
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