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You've got to stop doing that.

Seriously, it's getting dangerous.

I could die, you know.

(It's sick how I can sense your presence in a room. It's positively sickening. And once I finally see you, my eyes automatically stick to you, despite how much I don't want to want to. Still, though, it makes more sense than my eyes darting back and forth toward you and away from you, back and forth, unable to restrain myself, looking like the pathetic freak that I am. And you start to walk past me, and there is a moment when the entire human population is deprived. They are all starved, blank, empty homeless children. There is a moment where the angle and the distance and light I am seeing you in is beautiful beyond comprehension: instant understanding comes through and the process of comprehension doesn't exist. Everyone who doesn't, can't, experience this, this moment right now, is so sad. It is simply sad.

I am the only one who sees it. The lines, the angles of your face from this point of view, in both space and time. The way your cheek curves, the shape of your chin, the sweeping curve of your eye sockets and cheekbones.

That moment of incomprehensible beauty that only I know exists is the cause of the symptom. The symptom is lack of function of my lungs. I stop breathing. I literally cannot breathe. It's just a pause, a short amount of time, but for that time, I cannot breathe. It stops right in my throat, like a machine getting unplugged. And the amount of time for which my lungs are paralyzed is getting longer and longer and longer.)

You really have to stop.

I could end up dying.
And even if you don't mean to kill someone, it's still manslaughter.

I'll die, and the obituary will read "Name. Age. Died of asphyxiation, brought upon by an overdose of beauty."

The funeral will have much hushed talk.

"What happened, exactly?"

"She had a disorder. She saw more than most people. And then she overdosed on beauty. Accidental, they determined, although her disorder definitely helped it along. It stopped her breathing."

"Oh, lord. Couldn't the doctors do something?"

"No. There's no treatment for her kind of disorder. There's no treatment for her kind."

You might go to my funeral, I think. Mostly because you'll feel guilty. You have no idea of what you're doing. And you'll try to be discreet, but someone will eventually figure out who you are. "Over there! That's the one who killed her!" And you'll be told to leave, that no murderers should be around this funeral, that who knows if you'd have the same effect on someone else and cause another death.

And you'll be upset, you'll want to stay but everyone will want you to go, and you'll cry a tear or two, and you'll say, "But she had a disorder! I never thought... never dreamed... that I would agitate it. I never even knew she had the disorder. Nobody did."

And everyone will agree with you, but you will still have to leave. But not before you can leave some lilacs on my grave. You'll figure that since I'm dead, there's no need to worry about the beauty of the flowers stopping my lungs anymore.

And at my grave, on the headstone, below my name it will say, "The beauty was just too much for her to take."