Despite the horror, we survivors were endowed with a will to survive. Or instinct. Or maybe it was faith.

You are afraid to lose, you don't react, you are afraid of the horror of something which can be brutal killings and such... You are prepared to a victim I can said from here!

and I told myself -- as I've told myself before -- that the body shuts down then the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn't slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.

As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habitual behaviors seen in nature. But as beings who know they will die we digress into episodes and epics that are altogether dissociated from the natural world. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, anchor our minds far from its shores, and sublimate it as a motif in our sagas. Yet at no time and in no place are we protected from being tapped on the shoulder and reminded, __ou__e going to die, you know._ However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror of moribundity.

The higher consciousness are the ones who get the most pain.

It__ that short-lived happiness, which empowers us to bear; long-lasting pain in living.