Everyone always says that a near death experience changes your life - hell, there's even been a movie franchise based on the after-effects - but no one ever thinks about those people. It's almost as if they appear in the headlines for a split second, and vanish with an eerie permanence. What's next?

This was the second time it had happened. My second near death experience, that is. Everything happened in mere milliseconds, but I was spared for a reason. I'm not sure of what that reason is right now, but there must be one. There is no way that I could still be here, alive and recovering, without a divine reason. Why did I survive? And how did I get to a place like that?

I had the nightmare again. The images flashed across my eyelids like a film projector spinning out of control. Then comes the feeling. A fist. My forehead. The darkness setting in. The fear. Both leading to the same conclusion:

A certain, inevitable bleakness that I have come to regard as my only reality.

I still look the same, but no one remembers. My fifteen minutes are up. Either that or they just don't want to bring it up. That's nice of them. I don't want them to bring up such utter humiliation. There was once a man who asked what had happened to me and all my mighty strength. I couldn't answer him. I don't know. Ambition, maybe? Fear, perhaps? Anyone's guess is just as good as mine.

The others are long gone by now, but I never wanted much to do with any of them anyway. I'm sure they've been forgotten, too. Why wouldn't they be? They were just as weak as me. I am the only one who has survived. Does that make it better or worse?

Walking the streets now seems so meaningless. No one is really around me. They babble on as though every day was empty of any connections with others. The Araby is full of conversations as bleak as my consciousness. How do they find the reasons to keep coming back? I can't even find one to keep living as I once did. Maybe that's the problem:

I can't keep going as I once did.

My raison d'être was to overcome the powers that held me in place. But nothing was the same after that moment of darkness. I couldn't seek revenge. I was spared. Spared out of kindness, not malice, like the first time. No. This was much different. He told me "If you want to die, kill yourself." I'll never forget those words. They set the tone for my way of life. I didn't want to die. But I couldn't keep going the way I always had.

I had nothing to work toward. Nothing to live for.

Until the day I find my new raison d'être, I will keep looking. But right now, in this moment, I have never felt more clueless.