The streetlights of South London flickered with a buzzing, yellow fatigue that matched my mood perfectly.

Just the perfect sombre mood for a rather boring person who worked in data entry.

A boring person who lived in a studio apartment that smelled faintly of damp toast.

One who played games on the daily, yet possessed the incredible superpower of knowing exactly which Tesco Express self-checkout machine was about to jam.

And just my luck, the machine I had ended up on today had just jammed.

Lucky number 4, which had never failed me before, had finally faltered.

Was that a sign of bad luck or something?

For flips sake, looks like I'll have to go to the counter.

"I'll just take these Salt and vinegar crisps," I muttered, pulling my hoodie tighter against the drizzling April chill.

"And maybe those chocolate digestives in the corner there if they’re on offer. That would be grand."

The cashier checked out my items and I left the store. Glancing at my phone I looked at the time.

It was 11:42 PM.

The roads were mostly empty, save for the occasional distant siren and the wet shlick-shlick of tires on asphalt.

I reached the corner of the high street, waiting for the pedestrian signal to change.

Making a conscious choice not to jaywalk.

One might think that the action was quite pedantic, but really it stemmed from trauma from my younger days.

When I lived life more recklessly.

Back then I used to jaywalk all the time, until one day I almost met my end to a massive black truck.

It almost ran me over, coming out of nowhere in the blink of an eye.

Luckily it managed to stop at the last moment, the front rim of the truck ending up just mere breadths away from touching me.

That was over 7 years ago, and since then I've never jaywalked again.

I know rather sad.

Anyways, I now lived a life of beige predictability, and I was perfectly fine with that.

That’s when I saw her.

A young girl, maybe 15 or 16 years old, wandering across the road about twenty yards ahead of the crossing.

You shouldn't jaywalk young lady. You could get hit by a truck.

She was wearing bright pink headphones, staring down at the glowing phone in her hands, completely oblivious to the world.

Kids these days, always addicted to their devices. She was lucky that the road was mostly empty.

Well maybe it was too early to say that, only mere seconds later, the beam of two headlights shone down the street.

A massive, black multi-ton delivery truck was barreling down the lane. The light for the truck was green, and the girl was walking right into its path.

This scenario felt way too cruel, was this a cannon event for all people that lived in this area.

My heart did a frantic little tap-dance against my ribs.

This was the moment, wasn't it?

This was where the music swells, the protagonist lunges forward in slow motion, grabs the kid, and rolls to safety on the other side.

"Watch out!" I yelled, my voice cracking. "Hey! Kid! Stop!"

The girl didn't look up her headphones blocking any notion of sound from me.

The truck driver finally noticed her at the last moment and slammed on the brakes, the screech of tires sounding like a dying banshee.

I stood frozen on the pavement. My legs felt like they were made of set concrete.

I’m not fast enough, I thought with a paralyzing clarity. If I go out there, we both just die.

But the universe has a twisted sense of irony.

The truck driver, in a desperate, heroic attempt to avoid the little girl, jerked the steering wheel hard to the right.

The massive vehicle veered away from the child, its back end fishtailing wildly on the slick road.

I watched, eyes wide, as the grill of the truck grew larger and larger.

I wasn't even on the road.

I was standing on the sidewalk, three feet behind the safety bollards, exactly where I was supposed to be.

CRUNCH.

The impact didn't feel like pain at first. It felt like being hit by a tidal wave made of iron.

The world spun—sky, pavement, streetlamp, sky—until I landed with a wet thud against a brick wall.

The silence that followed was heavy.

The truck had come to a halt, smoking, buried in the front of a closed pharmacy.

The girl stood in the middle of the road, finally looking up from her phone eyes wide and unharmed.

I tried to breathe, but my chest felt like a crushed soda can. I looked down.

My legs were... well, they weren't where they were supposed to be.

Red was beginning to pool on the wet pavement, mixing with the rain in a swirling, morbid watercolour.

Oh, come on, I thought, my mind feeling strangely light.

What are the odds? I didn't even jaywalk. I stayed on the pavement. I did the right thing, and I'm the one getting killed?

This is statistically offensive. If this was going to happen it might as well have hit me 7 years ago.

The situation reminded me of final destination in a way.

I had escaped death by truck 7 years ago, and now it had finally come back to reclaim my life.

I felt a flare of genuine annoyance.

I wasn't even sad yet; I was just ticked off.

I had a half-finished series on Netflix, laundry in the dryer. and hadn't even gotten to eat my crisps.

"What a joke," I wheezed. A single bubble of blood popped on my lips.

The girl was crying now, people were running out of the pub down the street, and sirens were screaming in the distance.

But the sounds were getting muffled, like I was underwater.

The blackness started at the edges of my vision—not a dramatic fade, but a heavy, velvet curtain pulling shut.

My life wasn’t even that interesting, I thought, my consciousness flickering like a dying bulb.

But I still wanted to finish it. I wanted to see what happened next. This is... such... a rip-off...

The last thing I felt was the cold rain hitting my cheek.

Then, the blackness swallowed the annoyance, the pain, and the memory of salt and vinegar crisps.