Logan came to visit me not too long ago, and after hours of catching up at my place, we sat silently on a crosstown bus on our way to meet a friend for dinner.

“What are you thinking about, Mike?” she asked after some time.

I shook away my thoughts and paused before deciding to tell her the actual thing that I was thinking about. Do people always tell the truth when asked such a question? Who knows what crazy things out minds conjure up when left to their own synaptic devices. I often amuse myself by thinking about kittens or puppies or babies dressed up as kittens or puppies, but I would never admit it out loud. But I told Logan the truth:

“I was imagining myself dying on the way to dinner,” I confessed.

She laughed. “You were having a death fantasy?”

“It happens sometimes, out of nowhere,” I continued to divulge. “Like, I’m on my way to meet you or someone for dinner, and then I get hit by a cab or sideswiped by a bus. I imagine being sprawled on the ground, and before losing consciousness and then my life, texting whoever I’m meeting: ‘Sorry, have to cancel. Hit by bus. Tell everyone I love them.’”

“Boy, you are so cray,” she said, laughing. “I love it.”

It started back in 2002 when I first considered dedicating my life to becoming a writer of some sort and started sending in feature stories to a newswire. Later, I set a Google news alert for my name so that I could be notified whenever I story I wrote got picked up by a publication. You have probably done this too, and perhaps you have also experienced this next thing. Here is a news alert from the New York Times dated Dec. 22, 2002:

”Whenever I drive by I think about the deaths that have occurred there,” a woman, who would only give her name as Barbara, said while buying gasoline at a nearby mini-mart on Route 7 on a recent chilly afternoon.

In the near-dawn hours on Nov. 18, a Stamford high school student, Michael Dang, 16, was killed when his car crashed head-on into the rock and burst into flames.

Imagine getting sent an alert a few days before Christmas that says that you have died. Of course, you have not died, your proxy did. In 2002, I was 19, and a boy around my age who shared my name died in a fiery crash. I would not have known about this in a previous era when the technology wasn’t available to make this possible. This boy, Michael Dang, was a talented violinist who played for the Stamford Young Artists Philharmonic. I am convinced that I could find a YouTube clip of him somewhere of him playing some concerto in b minor, but I could never bring myself to do such a thing.

But on the day when the boy with my name died, my imagination betrayed me and I imagined dying in that crash instead of him. I imagined the ruined Christmas. I imagined my mother becoming hysterical and destroying all the gifts given to her, but saving the ones that were meant for me, storing them in a box in the garage to be never opened by the boy who would never get to see them. I imagined a version where instead of dying in the crash, I survived with severe burns and became unrecognizable. I imagined myself dying each day leading up to Christmas that year, and then I stopped imagining myself dying. Well, I thought it had stopped. I had death nightmares, and then death daydreams. They’ve become so common that they come for a fleeting few seconds during a subway ride, or a run in the park.

What if you died right now?

I learned to push the thought away. You are not going to die right now, so stop it.

I bring this up now only because I got another news alert this weekend, the third where a boy with my name had died. The story was dated Nov. 18, 2011, and read as follows:

Michael Koistinen, a former Windsor Locks police officer, is charged with striking 15-year-old Michael Dang with his car on October 29, 2010 and killing him …

The story came from Patch.com, and later when I followed up, I learned that the reporter had a made a mistake. The boy’s name was not Michael. It was Henry.