Another lackluster day, ended in an empty driveway. Heartbroken and shamed before the world, the wicked spawn of love laying waste to a field of dreams. So barren a plane to have born such fruit, it’s fate was set in stone, and no rearranging of the stars could have altered it. There is no potion so potent as to endure the afflictions of a young and fertile heart.

But my heart is young too. And it is sundered while midbeat, prepared for destruction but, at that moment, happened to be looking away. It is worn and weathered like a soldiers pocket watch, it’s many injuries healed over with a patchwork of romanticized ideals. At the same time festering with the lonely disease of reality, and fostering an innocuous cure for the sick at heart, both waiting to be unleashed.

Passion drips from my jowels, a frothing concoction of blood and sweat and tears collected. As if from a raincloud that follows my every move, they pool under me, congealing into a smooth and reflective surface of pure tension, off which my many shortcomings are amplified a thousand fold.

The time for change is always now. The time to lay childish things aside. The time to be selfish, get awesome, and learn to be the best me I can be. The one true Brian, an ineffable force, born from the moment of creation, when sum potentiality awoke, collapsing into the unified field we experience. Across oceans of time and space, born from the infinite shunyata, and deposited in the human machine, I have fought to reconnect to the Source, while others point elsewhere. I found love, even happiness, a clean spirited and innocent endeavor wrought with danger beyond a hill so far it cannot be travelled to.

I beat my heart again, and again. Baby steps, stalking the prey of loneliness. Forging the steel will to endure, to grow from this sundered carapace of mediocrity to the four wings of the enlightened soul. I strive for greatness, I lust for passion, I toil for truth. Where there is only the faintest of light, I see the spark of a star. Where there is only the named, material legos of realness, I see the quantum inception of harmony. Each memory of lost opportunities and failed commitments reflected in the cornea of my mind, producing a picture without color. A paint by numbers of how to live a drab and unholy existence, waiting for the catalyst of your heart, without a brush so fine to paint the detail you desire.

I refuse. To accept mediocrity. To endure failure without pressing their pages into a Cliff’s notes for success. To fall beside the path and watch those I love pass me by. I refuse to give up, and hereby forfeit the right to excuse. May this pain, which burns so fucking bright, never fade or become still, and instead be a hearth unto the cold, wet ceiling I’ve so soundly dented with my skull.

I define the world. The world defines me.

We are One.

I change the world. The world changes me.

We are Zero, seamless, shunyata.

“The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that may never be rewoven.”