As soon as Naomi woke up that day, she had known that she would die. She wasn't quite sure why, but she assumed that there was a reason for it all; perhaps she had done all she had needed to do on this Earth and she was needed someplace else. Perhaps the Universe was just doing some Spring cleaning. Whatever the reason was, she had known in her very being that it was a good one.
She was wrong.
She was only wrong about a small part of it, of course; she was going to die. However, she thought that she would die peacefully, with her friends and family near an open window (that had always been her dream, besides the one where she falls so desperately in love that she would die right in the spot, preferably in his arms- that wouldn't happen, either).
Another mistake that Naomi made was the idea she had formed in her head that there was a purpose to her death; there absolutely was not. The simple fact was that she was boring, and the Universe, in all of Its glory, had decided that because of the fact she would have to go.
She had had loves, but none were particularly tragic or monumental; they were not worth writing about, speaking about, or even thinking about. They began, continued, and ended with no suspense, no drama, no spectacular reason for which they existed. They just were.
Her family was neither abusive nor immensely supportive; they were, as most families are, in the middle of the spectrum.
She didn't have a job, and she wasn't particularly smart. Nor pretty, witty, or even interesting in the slightest application of the word. She wasn't mean, but she wasn't particularly nice, either. She was average, in the truest sense of the word, to everyone in the world; even to the Universe itself.
Well, almost everyone.
Thomas Crumb thought she was magnificent.
He had only seen her once, and it wasn't anything worth even talking about, at least not to everyone else. But to him it was, and he made it apparent to everyone else that he thought as much.
He saw her walking to the local store one day, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She was walking rather quickly, as though she had somewhere to be afterwards. She didn't.
And that was it. To him, it was the single greatest moment of his relatively short life (he was twenty-two), but to everyone else it was completely ordinary. Painfully so, in fact.
So when she walked into the funeral home he worked at as a casket salesmen, his heart skipped not just one, but exactly four and a half beats. When she told him she was buying the coffin for herself, it didn't skip; it collapsed into a fit of hopeless despair.
But we'll get to that later.
Naomi pondered her next steps as she brushed her teeth. She should visit her family, she supposed. She had moved out a few years ago (she was twenty-two, the same age as Thomas; cosmic coincidences are amazing, are they not?), but they still lived in town. She wondered if they would be sad as she spit out the toothpaste. As she gazed at her white teeth in the mirror, she supposed they would.
As she poured herself some cereal she concluded that the only other thing she would have to do is buy a coffin, or if that failed, a rather large oven.
As she cleaned out her bowl in the sink it dawned on her that she only had two things to do on the day of her death; it saddened her.
She didn't know what to wear. After much pondering on whether or not she would still get arrested for going nude if she told the cop she was dying, she chose a simple pair of jeans and a white T-shirt. It was the exact outfit Thomas had first seen her in, but she didn't know that, of course (another cosmic coincidence).
