Car crashes, knife fights, IED’s, close quarters firefights, stupidity with controlled substances, and adrenaline seeking behavior.

There was a good chance I wasn’t meant to live through these things. I thought, smashing out my cigarette into the black plastic ash tray. My face, through the cloud of smoke I was breathing out, looked haggard in the dirty mirror behind the bar. I could still see the scar on my nose where a fragment of a bullet had clipped me. The wrinkles were getting more defined, the eyebrows bushier, the hair creeping farther back on my head, and the bags beneath my eyes were darker every day.

I held my glass of Jack up to the scarred old man staring back at me, toasting him. “To youth, good luck, and living for the day.” Even my reflection knew I was full of shit.

I wondered why others had been taken and I had been spared. Was it for some purpose? Was I meant to do something important? Had I pissed that away like so many other things in my life?

Is it too late? I asked myself.