The time has come for me. The time when I say to myself that I have had enough. Enough of the emptiness that consumes. Enough of being nothing, enough of being unheard, being unseen, being misunderstood. Enough of being judged. Enough of the belief that I am undeserving, somehow invisible, insignificant.

I am large. I contain multitudes.

The universe inside of me is unending, with no borders and no boundries. I refuse to live in your world, I refuse to live in a place that is not mine. I refuse to live in a skin that you have created for me. I am large, so large, so infinite, so full of possibility and I will not submit to anything less than what I am worth.

Sometimes I may appear to be weak when in truth I am stronger than a thousand other men. Sometimes I may not believe in myself, but I have more faith than a million other believers. Sometimes I appear to be young, but I am older than the first memories of man. An ancient mystery lives inside of me, its heart beating with mine.

I have written ten thousand stories, dreamed 20 million dreams.
I have held worlds together and I have torn them apart.
I have appeared brightly in your eyes, and I have disappeared.

And I have chosen all of this, the happiness and the pain. I take responsibility for all that has passed.

I decided to become nothing, to be invisible, to walk into the darkness of my own soul so that I may find myself like I once said I would in a junior-high poem. And so I am fulfilling a promise I made years ago. I decided to destroy myself in hope of becoming something more. And if you think I have become less, if you think I have really gone from myself and the world, then I tell you that you are wrong. I tell you to look deeper into me, to look deeper into yourself.

And now I choose again.

Now I choose to be unforgettable, to contain the multitudes of the spiralling universe, to burst forth like a supernova into the sky of humanity. See me now. See me finally for who I really am. Do you see how brightly I shine?

I don't know why, but I just can't believe in myself. Every dream is tinted with the bitter edge of failure. They fall from me, scattering like broken glass. They cut into me, reminding me of the minutes that pass, of each moment where I am nothing and going nowhere.

Frustration rubs against my mind, sometimes until I walk the line of sanity. I used to scream at the top of my lungs in my high school nights, ripped out my hair in chunks and once I found myself in the ER after nearly passing out from chest pains - the membrane of my ribs inflammed from stress.

Everywhere I go I don't feel good enough. So many years of needing more, wanting to be more...have I gone mad? And then I realize that I'm trying to please an insatiable enemy. For long I've said a quiet "fuck you" to all those who thought I wasn't good enough, to those who didn't believe in me or brushed me off, to my father. I say to them look at where I am, look at what I have done in my 19 years but I'm not finished yet...there's more, there's so much more. I say to them I won't stop until I make you feel ashamed of yourself, until I make you feel worthless, until jealousy rips you apart - maybe then you'll see how you made me feel. But then I see, I see how empty all of this is. The pursuit of something so wrong, so questionable, so against everything I believe in.

It used to be driven by a pulsing and unignorable anger, but now the anger has grown subversive. It evolves like Issey Miyake fabrics, transforms like a Hussein Chalayan dress. It hides, it wears a beautiful Marc Jacobs outfit flowing down a catwalk, beckoning with her soft glowing eyes - "look at me, where I can get you, where I have gotten you, believe in me." But it wasn't you, it wasn't you, it was never you. It was me, this fearful child still hiding in the apartment above a chinese restaurant, still afraid of ghosts in the walls. It was never your cunning, but my innocence, never your beauty, but my ugliness.

.

The future sprawls out in front of me and I am a cautious child stepping uncertainly into the world. Here in Vancouver, my family and friends lay elsewhere, their comfort and intimacy outside of my grasp. Here there is a solitude I have not experienced in years, an aloneness that is beautifully comforting and scary at the same time.

In myself I look for understanding. In myself I have found companionship. It's always slightly unsettling after realizing that I have carried out an hour's conversation in my head, as if I were different characters living in the same skin. When I am alone, I sense I am not. Perhaps there are ghosts inside of me, spirits of the people I once were flowing in my blood.

The past is fading from me. Quiet nights alone in coffee shops; the sound of live music and laughter touching my soul; fireworks in July - these memories have taken on a dreamlike quality and I know that in a while, their feelings will disappear, their depth but a vague line of color on a saturated canvas.

What does it mean when you begin to know that what once was will never be again? Because it once seemed to me that the past gave me the future, from it I could perhaps discern a pattern of what lies ahead, but lately I have come to realize that I don't really know anything at all. This disturbs me a little and sometimes a lot.

And then I see that I have never really known anything, that my life has been a series of coincidences with a director that I can only call a soul. A soul that I have seen very briefly for moments at a time. And I see that there is nothing to do but to trust this spirit, this universe inside of me, to believe that it will one day take me home.

The hours of a day. They shift unexpectedly, alive with a mind of their own.

It is early and the sun rises, the city rumbles from its sleep and as your eyes open you feel anxious, or empty, or heavy with a dream that you cannot quite remember. It is as if a moment ago you finally knew something, but that has gone from you now. In that moment between sleep and life, you make a choice to face the day.

What is life but to know that every moment is a choice?
What is death but to live without knowing it?

And as you stir from your darkness, take a moment and breathe in. Stand and face the door to your bedroom before heading out into the world and prepare for the hours, the day that has a life of its own. Free it from your grasp and know that no matter what happens, the hours move on. The day passes. The night comes.

Sometimes I forget all this. Sometimes I wrap myself up in a moment that seems to have no end, a tunnel forgotten by time. There, it is impossible to walk out and light (life) disappears. There, there is no choice.

Yet somehow, without knowing it, I find myself free again. That is the nature of the hours, the moments that flow so unseemingly yet distinctly from one to the other, so intricate that their is no denying that they are alive.

And you talk, you anger, you laugh, you despair and on and on until the night comes and sleep takes hold of you. And in those hours of darkness, those hours that are an eternity, you finally remember that all of this is but a dream.

So when you awake, in that moment before the day arrives, remember what you knew in sleep, remember that the choice is in your hands. Breathe in before you face the hours, and know that their life is yours.

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