'It isn't fair….'

That was the only thought that kept repeating itself within my mind.

'Why now? '

I thought as I waited for my shallow breathing to end.

'Why did this happen when I finally decided to change myself? It isn't fair…'

Regret. That was the only emotion I felt while I lied on my deathbed. I regretted the entire last five years of my life. Every wrong decision, every mistake I made kept playing in front of my eyes. Not for the first time in my life, I wondered…

'What my life could have been like if I had worked harder? How elated would my parents have become if only I had pulled myself back onto the right track instead of wasting my time through various distractions?'

Never would I have thought that something as small as a hobby could leave me with regret instead of fear while dying.

All of that had become a moot point now that I lie here dying due to a disease whose existence was unknown until a few months ago.

-x-

Born to a middle-class family in India in the late 90s, my life until this moment could be summarized by a single word, average. I wasn't born with an unprecedented intelligence or with a prodigious athletic talent or with incredibly good looks and charisma. The only thing I always was, was an over-thinker with an active imagination.

Even as a child, I often wondered how it would be like to live as someone else, with any other point of view than my own. Perhaps that is why I got hooked onto various novels and animes on the internet. These novels provided me with a world so different than my own, so diverse, so adventurous that I often yearned to be a protagonist of a story of my own creation in these fantastical worlds.

So immersed I was in my desires that I didn't even realize when a hobby which started as a means to pass time became an addiction, an escape from reality. Pathetic as it may sound, I sought comfort in nothing but a figment of someone's imagination rather than dealing with all the problems in my life.

I had always thought that I was in complete control of my actions, that I could abandon these 'means to pass time' at the drop of a hat and thus, I ignored all the times my mother warned me about my, at that time unknown, addiction. I unknowingly got so addicted that I even forgot my responsibilities, goals, dreams in real life. By the time I realized this problem, I had already wasted a couple of years of my education, my friend circle became almost non-existent, and my previously above-average grades plummet.

Ironically, when I finally steeled myself to change, disaster struck in the form of an epidemic rendering all my determination useless in its wake, ending my life.

I don't know if there is an afterlife, or if reincarnation exists, but as I lie here, breathing my last breath, I vowed to myself that...

'If there is another chance, another life to live, I would give my all to become successful in life and enjoying it to the fullest...'