I never considered myself a bad person.

Not that that means anything. After all, I doubt Hitler ever considered himself a bad person, and he was a fierce advocate of genocide. I also doubt that Jack the Ripper believed that what he did — cutting up and butchering prostitutes — was in any way "bad." He probably thought himself some sort of vigilante fighting for the rights of the wives of men who hired prostitutes or something. Just like how rapists thought they were helping the world by being sperm donors. It sounds delusional, I know, but we all have our justifications for our actions, be they mass murdering an entire race of people, or simple shoplifting of a lollipop from a convenience store. Point is, people never considered themselves evil, not really.

But that's not what I meant when I said that I never considered myself a bad person. I'm not a mass murderer. Not a serial killer. Not a thief, not an adulterer, and I'm completely devoid of megalomaniac tendencies. I was not evil, and I knew that. The worst thing I ever did was yell at my parents, and I felt like absolute crap right after doing that. I aced all my classes, made my bed, didn't play around with boys, didn't do drugs. Ask anyone and they'd say that I was so nice I would never hurt a fly.

I was the epitome of a goody-two-shoes. A stickler for following rules. I was good, and completely, utterly, absolutely boring. The kind of boring that grew up to live boring lives, doing boring things, having boring jobs, marrying boring people, having boring children and grandchildren, dying in the most boring of ways. That was the kind of boring I was. The kind of boring that lived such long, long lives, as if the gods of longevity and irony decided to compensate for the boredom by giving them more time for it.

I wasn't the type of boring that committed suicide, or did any self-harm. I found the thought of pain terrifying, so I never so much as imagined inflicting it to myself.

I wasn't the type of boring that flunked out of school and became drug addicts or alcoholic waitresses or whores. No way. I went through and finished college. I was a graduate student.

And I was definitely not the type of boring that got kidnapped, brought to a dark alley, then got raped and then killed with a long, quick, deep slice of a knife through the neck.

Ha ha ha. Cue sarcastic laugh.

Imagine my surprise when I got kidnapped and raped and killed on a Thursday night.

And imagine my shock, when I realized that I was alive again after that.

Imagine the expression of surprise and horror on my face, when I realized that yes, I was alive, but I was in the body of a ten-year-old.

A ten-year-old boy.

A ten-year-old boy surrounded by ashes and ashen remains of what may have once been people.

I wasn't a bad person. I was good, in every sense of the word. I just wanted to live a long and simple life. I was a boring person, and was completely happy with my boring life.

And this, I thought as I rose from the soot-covered floor and curiously inhaled the cloying scent of death around me, this was definitely not boring.