i am apprehensive of the sensation of the bullet penetrating my body. i keep seeing my bullet ridden body in dust, my blood coloring red the gray dust of the square. i had felt the pain of the bullet entering my body, had tasted to blood. i had seen my bloody corpse strewn in the dust among the others. i had experinced death.and now, i am alive. i have seen the sunrise. i am touching the earth, the grass. i am here on the mountain. it is so simple to be alive. you move, you breathe, you touch. you feel the air about you. you can see, see far about you. the mountain, the people, the sky. i stop being afraid. breathing is diffucult. no one speaks. the lack of air imposes its own dominion. you sit comply. sit or stand with your mouth open, eyes half-closed. do not breathe, but draw in air in short gasps. do not sit or stand upright, but lean against the body next to you. let your body go limp. do not think. let your mind go limp. this is my first encounter with death. or was it? what we had just witnessed and its aftermath-dead bodies strewn in the dust, grey and indifferent, colored by pools of blood-was this death? ir was it something else? something much more implicable? what is death all about? what is life all about?