I've been to too many funerals.
I've seen too many deaths.
It started too soon for me. The first loss, the first corpse, the first pool of blood from a lifeless body.
Too soon. All too soon.
I've always seen death as the most dreadful thing. Death is a pair of cold, dark hands that rip off from you the most precious thing...the most precious person. Death is a loud blast, a burning dark hole that transforms... that changes one you know into vitreous, immobile eyes, and expressions of fear and pain.
That's death for me.
Death is my enemy. Death is the one thing I fight against. Death is the one I dare night after night. Other people death. My own death.
I play with it. I make its territory my own. It can't reach me using weapons, or heights, or people, or luck... I've fooled them all, one by one, and all together. I took chances, and I won.
So death got its revenge. It attacked me where I'm most vulnerable. It went for my friends, for my family, for the kids, for the innocent. I fought those dark claws.
And sometimes I lost.
However, I never gave up. I wouldn't. I won't. I put myself in harm's way. I showed it my chest, I offered it my face. I knocked out the blades and the guns, the falls and the fires.
I survived.
And yet, somehow, I just kept wondering?
It's not a matter of "if" ... it's a matter of "when".
It's a matter of how.
