I started having premonitions as a kid. I would see the future for someone. Sometimes it was scary, or bad, and sometimes it was wonderful. It led to a whole lot of mental distress and trying to save people, or choosing not to save people, and committing minor crimes along the way, like breaking and entering, trespassing, small robberies, destruction of property, hiding things people owned like their car keys so they couldn’t drive, one time locking my favorite librarian up in her home so she wouldn’t get hit by a train, things of that nature.

All of my tiny criminal acts or legal interventions have been to slow someone down so that the premonition will pass them by. So many times in life an accident hits that if you waited one minute, one, it would have shot past you. I try to make that minute happen. All the crimes were necessary. I don’t regret any of them. I knew what was going to happen to those people—innocent people, often friends, people I loved and cared about—if I didn’t.

That’s the curse of having premonitions: You know what’s upcoming for people.

You may have to become a criminal momentarily to save them.

But I have had one premonition off and on my whole life, starting when I was about five years old.

In that premonition there are two women, one of them me, and one of us dies. I don’t know if it’s me or the other woman who heads up the golden staircase to heaven. I have not been able to figure this out, which is strange.

My endings for my other premonitions are all quite clear, but there’s a fuzziness here, as if the premonition doesn’t even know precisely who is dead at the end of it.

I don’t know who the other woman is. I don’t know how old I’ll be. I don’t know when it will happen. What I do know is that I’m driving on a road, wide enough for only one car, alongside a mountain on my right. On my left side is a steep cliff. The ocean is in the distance, peeking through the pine trees, and there’s a whole bunch of orange poppies. I see the oncoming car, and we both swerve, and crash.

Sometimes one car shoots over the cliff, sometimes both cars. Sometimes there’s an earsplitting explosion, crackling flames and black smoke bubbling up from the bottom of the cliff, sometimes not. Sometimes we’re sandwiched together, teetering over the cliff, up and down, sometimes not. It’s blurry, this premonition. Like rain is blurring the full photo, but there is no rain.

It’s troubling to know that a car crash, on a cliff, may kill me.

Or it may not.

Other than the premonitions? I am utterly, completely normal.

Which means that I’m one hot mess.