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Broken, wasted, wasted. It was all gone, all gone, all hope, all despair, all second chances. And for what? To be a fucking soldier in some petty king’s army, bleeding out on the battlefield? Ah well.
It’s not that he hadn’t been alive, it’s that he hadn’t known how to live.
It seemed as if he had spent his entire life fruitlessly searching, chasing after… something, or maybe someone, like some crazy demented, distorted Taijitu symbol, except he didn’t know who, and had had never found him. Or her. Or it, maybe. An idea? Whatever. Wasn’t -- shouldn’t there be -- a white to his black, a sword to his pistol, reason to his emotion, ice to his fire? Wasn’t there?
Shouldn’t there be more? Or maybe life and living was what you made of it, even if you spent all your days feeling as if half of you was missing, and the other half spent all its time trying to think of how things were supposed to follow in a logical sequence, like a child learning how to walk. One foot in front of the other, one foot slides forward, then one foot again. He had never really understood what other people seemed to just know.
When all was said and done, he had never learned to run, had he: to chase the wind; to catch snowflakes on his tongue; to really taste his food; to savor the fleeting flickers of fireflies on warm summer nights.
And now he wasn’t sure he had ever even crawled, come to think of it.
Wasted, all of it.
Karma was such a fucking bitch, wasn’t it? He supposed he had really screwed up in his last life.
And it was really fucking amazing the shit you thought of right before the ax came slicing down.
**
Up in Heaven, a figure knelt and peered into a lily pond, then flicked droplets from Her fingers, banishing the image. “That’s one down. Try a bit harder next time,” She murmured.