Exile Existence

I am different. I am invisible although I exist. It’s my curse for living. When I was nine I was involved in a terrible freak car accident with my uncle. He died instantly. However. … I didn't. … I should have died. Fading back and forth from reality, I watched the lights from the hospital hallways pass above me. One by one I counted. I could feel death pulling the leash from my life. It’s time to go, I could feel him say. … However, I was stubborn. Gripping my hand on the hospital bed rail, I kept my mind centered on living. I could feel death watching with the void of his eyes. His presence felt like a foul odor. A cold and lifeless welcome. I lifted my hand towards the light. Blood. So much blood. I thought to myself. Losing consciousness, a tear rolls down my face. I could hear a swooshing sound. Wind? From blackness a surge of vivid bright colors. I smile. … I refused to die.

I woke up with my parents by my side in a small hospital room. They seemed happy to see me. They hug me. Somehow I had survived. But something felt different.

Weeks pass by. As I returned to school, everything somehow seemed to have changed. I was once the most social and beloved kid in the school, but now it seems I have become irrelevant, unimportant, ignored. Day by day I grew angry. Why have I been ignored? Why was everyone being so cruel? The week went on. Day by day I began to distance myself. No one seemed to care anymore about me. I couldn’t understand why. As I became completely ignored at school, my parents began to care less and less about me. It wasn’t long before I was an ignored child. I began to retreat from the world into myself. Eventually I had become a complete introvert.

Growing angry of my uncared-for absence in the world, I ran away from home. I knew no one would come after me, so I walked the railroads without a care in the world. It was on the railroads where I discovered her. A girl with no name. She told me she knew I wouldn’t handle the world much longer and that I would join them. She told me somehow I had escaped fate and because of this there were consequences. I didn’t know what she was talking about but when I looked away and looked back her, she was gone. Was this my fate? Did I make a mistake by not choosing fate?

I returned home later that evening and stared at the night sky. It seems everything has an end. It must be fate. However, have I escaped my fate? Should I have not existed? All of a sudden I felt that feeling once more. I knew he was watching. His cold suffocating presence made me feel as if I wasn’t alone. Perhaps one day he will come back for me and take what was long overdue. Until then I had to continue with my meaningless existence… Until then, I continue to defy fate.