Excerpt: What I Thought While I Was Dying

I used to watch the local news every night, and read the newspaper at least once a week. There are all these horrible things that happen in my city. People get shot for no reason at all, just shot by someone while they're driving down the interstate. Or shot because they parked too close to someoneelse's car. They prey on the elderly, because there's no one to look after them. They just knock on their door and rob them. Or, break in to your house in the middle of the night while you're sleeping. I used to watch the reporters talking about these things on the news and think it was horrible, but on some abstract level. I couldn't be truly outraged, because it wasn't me.Those sorts of things didn't happen to people like me, or so I thought, because until recently, it never had. I had never been robbed. I was complacent, dangerously complacent. And, it nearly cost me my life. I know it's not healthy to live in a world where you fear everything, but before... In my life before this, I think I wasn't afraid of enough. And now, now I'm terrified. And angry, or jaded maybe? Or both? I wonder what kind of world I must live in where someone could do something like what happened to me. What kind of people have such an obvious disregard for human life? I hardly sleep at night, tossing and turning. I have horrible nightmares almost every night. I wonder, do they sleep soundly? Do the monsters I dream about dream of me?