I had an entire 20 minute conversation with a coworker. She died three days before it happened. I have proof.
I need to write this down before I convince myself it didn't happen, because I've been trying to do that for two weeks and it isn't working. Her name was Dara. She worked two desks down from me for four years. Not my closest friend at work, but the kind of person you share lunch breaks with and talk to about everything and nothing, her dog, bad TV, whether the coffee machine was broken again. Good people, you know? The kind that just make a room feel okay. She died on a Tuesday. A car accident on the highway, sudden, nobody saw it coming. Our whole office was devastated. I found out through a group text on Thursday morning and I cried in my car for an hour before I could go in.
Here's where it breaks. On Friday, two days after I found out, three days after she died, I talked to her, in person. For twenty minutes, at her desk, about nothing important, about her dog needing a groomer, about a meeting scheduled for the following week, about how the coffee machine was finally fixed. I know how that sounds. I've been over every rational explanation: grief hallucination, extreme stress, some kind of dissociative episode. I'm open to all of it. But here's the part I can't explain away.
During that Friday conversation, I mentioned i'd been meaning to text her about a playlist she'dd shared with me weeks earlier. She pulled out her phone right there and AirDropped me three new songs. Said I'd like the second one best.
I accepted the AirDrop. I remember the notification.
When I got home that Friday night, I was unpacking my bag and my phone buzzed, a news article a mutual friend had shared about the accident. That's when the timeline fully hit me. I sat completely still for about ten minutes. Then I opened my music app.
The three songs were there. Added to my library on Friday at 1:14 PM. Her name on the sender tag from the AirDrop log: Dara's iPhone.
I have the screenshot. I don't know what to do with it.
I went back to the office the following Monday desperate for someone to confirm they'd also seen her Friday. Nobody had. Her desk had been quietly cleared by HR over the weekend. One colleague told me she'd been noticeably absent all week and the mood had been heavy since Thursday.
I started wondering if I'd imagined it so hard I'd also somehow imagined receiving files from a dead woman's phone. So I checked the AirDrop log again. Still there. I emailed the three songs to myself from a different device just to make sure they were real files and not some cache ghost. They played. The second one, like she said, was the best.
I've told two people. One said grief does strange things to the brain. The other went quiet for a long time and then said: Don't look into it too hard.
I don't know what happened on that Friday. I don't know if there's a version of events that makes sense. But I keep coming back to one small detail that I have noy been able to let go of...
The meeting she mentioned, the one scheduled for next week? It was never on the shared calendar. But on Monday morning, I found a meeting invite in my inbox, sent the previous Friday at 1:21 PM.
Sent from her work email.
I still havent accepted or declined it.