Here we go again…

“Welcome to McDonalds, may I take your order?”

I feigned a smile at the guy who stood on the other side of the counter. His eyes scanned the menu on the wall behind my back as my finger continue to tap over the cash register in front of me. Even as he began to give me his order, I couldn’t keep my gaze from darting to his left cheek. The number 45 rested there, etched into his skin. It certainly felt too big to avoid looking at, even as much as I hate to see it.

Why couldn’t it be on his neck, or in his back or whatever, somewhere hidden by clothing? It always had to be on the left part of the cheek, where I couldn’t avoid it. Even if I very much liked to.

I bit my lip, anxiously. Whilst my mind run through potential causes of death. Car accident were common, so that guess wasn’t particularly creative. Maybe it’d be cancer? Or heart disease?

“I’ll take two BigMac Together Pack. To-go.” He said and my thoughts immediately disperse.

Yep. Heart disease.

I winced but quickly smile as I tap onto the monitor and repeated his order. “That’ll be ₩25,200”

Heart disease was one of the leading cause of death in South Korea, and yet here I was, working at a fast food place on the outskirts of Hongdae, with the literal ability to see peoples’ age of death, and – in case like the guy, supporting it to happen.

From my decent perspective, that might’ve seemed wrong. In fact, it certainly was. But I had a single solution to this decent dilemma. To simply ignore it in hopes that it will eventually go. I tried not to think about it. I didn’t allow myself to care about the people I was serving. Knowing when they will die made it inconvenient to get invested, to say the least, and if there was one thing I’d learned, it was that sometimes you have to let people make their own decisions.

I tried to interfere once and it didn’t worked.

He gave me an exact amount and hasty paved when I gave him his order. Next up was a woman on her phone flanked by two small children – a boy and a girl, a twin rather, both about six years old. My heart dropped into my stomach.

“Lisa, don’t look, don’t fkin’ look,” I repeatedly said in my head like a mantra, as I smile and took the order of the woman who’d die at age 81, but then she went back to her phone and made her kids order for themselves, and I had to look. The boy would live up to 72, but the girl would die at 51. I’d seen worse.

I gave the woman her total, and she distractedly handed me her driver’s license instead of her credit card. She was trying to balance her phone call and her children.

I smile and corrected her, I curiously glanced down at her date of birth. August 20, 1979. Today is August 23, 2019. She just turned 40 a couple days ago and about thirty years older than her daughter. That 81 and 51 suddenly became a lot harder for me to stomach.

I swallowed hard as we swapped cards, and then she paid, took her food, and moved on. So did I.

I can’t help not to wonder if the mother and daughter would die at the same time or just a few months apart from different causes.

“Lisa. Breathe,” a voice commanded near my ear as a hand gently squeeze my arm. Hoony oppa.

I must’ve looked as tense as I felt.

Seunghoon oppa or as what he liked to be called, Hoony was a 27 year old college dropout who worked here with me. He was the only person who knew what I could do, and that was because he could do it too. We’d spotted each other instantly when we’d met and just known. It’d been hard not to. We were both kind of obvious about our obsessions, cheek-looking obsession.

When I met Hoony oppa, the first thing he’d done was to glance to mine even as I’d stared up at his. His arched eyebrow and my wide-eyed look in response had been all it’d taken to confirm we were both looking for the same thing.

Hoony would die at age 76. In the meantime, he made me promise not to tell him his number – in the irony of all ironies, we could see the number of every person we met, even when we didn’t want to, but we couldn’t see our own. Hoony also refused to tell me my number, which was probably for the best.

Neither of us could remember waking up one day with this awful ability. We’d both just always been this way. We had little else in common, but the side effects our special “quirk” had caused over the years – mild to moderate depression, extreme cynicism, and emotional detachment, to name a few – were enough to eventually bring us together. He was my only friend, and I wanted to keep it that way. Even people who’d die at 100 still had a visible expiration date – or at least to people like Hoony and me, anyway.

I wasn’t really equipped to deal with having multiple friends whose age of death were constantly staring me in the face. My father and Hoony were enough.

But even the two of them would die eventually. Everyone did. It was inevitable. It was one thing to know that like a normal person did, to have it in the back of my mind, only to creep up every once in a while. And when it did creep up in the mind of a normal person, perhaps be a brief moment of existential crisis, and maybe some of the momentary panic or fear that comes with being actively self-aware of our own mortality.

When would it happen? How would it happen? Would it hurt?

But for normal people, that moment would fade, and life would go on. It wouldn’t