Here's looking at you.

The first time I died, I felt barely anything at all.

It was like water flowing over me, like I had just fallen into a deep green pool. I felt the rush, the weightlessness, and the plugging in my ears as they filled with cool water, as a liquid swept all around me, consuming me entirely. I never opened my eyes, not once, because I was worried that whatever was swimming around me would burn them. Then I began to drift, a slow decline, downwards - floating, drifting in slow motion, deep into an abyss. I let the abyss take me whole.

When I opened my eyes at last, I was in a hospital bed. There was no-one around me. Not until later, when my family and a few of my friends came around to make sure that I was okay. I had been involved in a bus crash, they said. The driver had had a heart attack at the wheel while winding around a curve on a forested mountain, and I was one of very few people to survive the cataclysm he had unwittingly brought upon us. Down, down, down we fell, down the mountain face, hapless commuters, rolling passengers to an ill fate. Up, down, left, right. As the bus tumbled, bones snapped and brains rattled, shrieks and final whispers. Many died, but I survived.

So they all seemed to believe.

My mother once told me that death, for most, is moving on. A reprieve from a tragic life wrought by constant never ending pain and suffering. For a life in itself is forever plagued by agony, and the reality was that though we may try to weld our broken bones, when one snaps, another will surely break in due time. And so the cycle goes, on, and on, and on.

But not for us, she promised me. Not for us, the enlightened ones. Yes, our life was certainly pained, she said, and it is this I would come to understand in due time. I never truly understood the meaning behind her words, and for so long I could not. For I had very many mother-figures in my time that the message was almost lost to me. Lost to the chilled mist of memory, fading away into the distance. I never understood - until at last, the bus came tumbling down the side of that godforsaken mountain.

Our lives, she said, were different than others. For we were the ones who carried on.

She taught me not to hate myself for all the things I'd done. Not to feel regret or guilt for causing pain to others throughout the course of my life. She taught me to value my life, to revel in how otherworldly the world is - how beautiful and blissful all the facets of the earth can be, in all its infinite strangeness. Like nothing else in the universe. She taught me to love every single grain of sand on the beach, to love every single blade of grass on the ground - for it would love us until the end of time.

Mother taught me that, unlike others, we could see the world for what it truly was: beautiful. Strange and beautiful.

When she said 'world', though; what she meant... what she truly, honestly meant... was life.

If only they could all see it, I thought so often. If only every single person knew how valuable their lives were. How tragic and cyclical and sparkling and romantic and comedic and thematic and philosophical and pointless in the most infinitely meaningful way their lives were.

For you are only blessed with only one - and you should spend your body, your form, your shape and your mind, experiencing the wildest of journeys, and the most sensual of pleasures. Succumb to the flowery decadence of eroticism. Cry full-formed tears at the loss of a job, or the death of a family member - or the parting of a tender lover.

Use your long, slender fingers to grasp the bow of a violin, and run it delicately along the needle-thin strings, letting the strings vibrate at the touch of the bows' fibres, chirping sweet notes into the rattled air. Let the sound echo out a soft requiem. Whichever way you choose to spend your life; take in every minuscule moment. For it exists for you, and only for you, to do with it what you wish, in all its glory and its beauty.

That is what I have done since I first died. I have travelled the land and stared up at the stars, remembering always what my mother told me. I have brushed my hair with fine-toothed combs just to feel its sensual scratch upon my scalp. I have climbed mighty mountains, scaled high cliff faces and traversed dry and expansive deserts. I have taken many lovers, beautiful both for their minds and for their bodies.

For your form is the only one you truly have, and you should let it see the wonders of the world. If only your hesitant mind were not such a resistant nuisance. This body, this form, these lips, these long locks of hair, these athletic legs, this chiselled physique, these eyes that spill colour like a vibrant flower. These are all a part of you - and still you all choose to waste them.

You waste your bodies, and your hearts, plundering nothing but the food from your fridge. You seek synthetic lovers through the internet, and embrace pixels with an electrified touch. You live lives of convenience rather than charity; discretion rather than danger - and that is a crime to all those who truly lack the capacity to seek adventure, or to chase dreams.

It is for these reason that we do what we do, and I have my mother to thank for ridding me of my inherent guilt at what many might deem these atrocities. But they are not atrocities - they are blessings. Truly, these actions of mine are blessings rather than curses - and I think not for the thoughts of the people for whom I grant these blessings, for I know that I am showing them wonders of the world.

On this day, I am out in the world. I'm walking down the side of an immensely busy street in the cold morning air. My bones are fragile and weak, as my many journeys throughout my time in this body have aged them terribly. Hobbling along with a walking cane, I notice a man on the other side of the road, with a face as irate and wrought with fury, as any one of the thoughtless souls wasting their lives wandering to and from their day to day activities like mindless ants in a frenzied hive.

He will be the one, I think to myself. I will show him all the wonders of the world.

He doesn't know that I'm looking at him, unfortunately, and I can sense already the confusion that will soon devour him once I have completed my task. I take several steps onto the road in front of me, and wait for the largest vehicle to casually rush on by.

Mother once told me long ago that the key to how we live is in the execution, she said. What I failed to understand is the double meaning she applied.

Death, for most, is moving on - and though you may weld your broken bones time and time again, you will never truly understand the honest to god tragedy that is your existence until you finally succeed in wasting it all away. My family, however, see death differently to yours.

We carry on around you, fluttering about in the crowds like any other mindless ant, collecting and working and functioning like anybody else that you can see with your own two eyes. We move, we dance, we fuck, we love, we play and we laugh like anybody else. But we are not you. Nor are we who our smiling faces say we are. We are not you - we are greater. We are living.

It took dying for the first time to show me that.

I see it - a long bus, driven by a man so large and round he is practically a circle. I take the chance; stepping out onto the sidewalk, I fix my gaze upon the man across the road, who still staggered along the sidewalk as though with every step he spilled another woe to the concrete ground before him.

Here's looking at you, friend. The one I will show the wonders of the world.

There is a screeching of tyres, and a combined cacophony of horns and screams from all around the crowded street. The sound of metal colliding with metal and the screeching of tyres fills the air, as I feel my body being flung violently across the street.

What feels like water flows over me, as though I had just fallen into a deep green pool. I felt the rush, the weightlessness, and the plugging in my ears as they filled with cool water, as a liquid swept all around me, consuming me entirely. I never opened my eyes, not once, because I was worried that whatever was swimming around me would burn them. Then I began to drift, a slow decline, downwards - floating, drifting in slow motion, deep into an abyss. I let the abyss take me whole.

I come to, at long last.

I'm standing on a concrete ground, looking out before me onto what appears to be a road. There seems to have been an accident. I look deeper, and see a man sprawled out onto the concrete, metres away from the bloodied bumper of a motor vehicle. A bus that had just hit an elderly man.

Then, like a knife through a cloudy veil, it all comes back to me in a flicker of a second.

I drop the briefcase I'm holding in my hand. Reaching into my pockets, I pull out what appears to be a lighter - a jet lighter, the silvery kind that reflects like a mirror. Looking into my reflection, I note my features.

I have bright green eyes. Looking deep into the vibrant colours in my eyes, I hear a sound in the back of my mind... I hear screaming. The sound of a man, screaming and screaming until his throat is hoarse.

The first time I died, I felt barely anything at all. The second, however, felt like being reborn.