Ubiquitous "It's never enough, is it?" Said the valedictorian, all the nights of missed sleep collected under their eyes, slowly suffocating in paperwork, pencil shavings, AP Exams. They look dead on their feet. You want to call the doctor, but then they'll miss a class and fall behind. Said the valedictorian's younger sibling, staring at their A+ and wanting to be sick because it's not good enough, it's not. It's a competition, and its impossible to lose only because losing would be easy. You want to call a psychiatrist, but then they'll get even more worried and no one wants to go down that road. Said the mother of them both, looking at their luxurious empty house with something akin to dread. Decades of #life, and the only things that really belong to her are her children, and they are still half his, anyway. She looks like she's going to cry. You want to comfort her, but that would be awkward. Said her husband, a politician, to his advisor as they gazed at the polls. There's money in his name, but there's dirt, too. You can almost see it on this ambitious man, who's never loved anything like he's loved a percentage of people that want to trust him with power. He looks slightly insane, and you want to call for help, but you must be overreacting.

The Beginning The beginning. That's what this is. Yep. Just the start of a story. I bet now would be a good place to start having a one-sided discussion about some beautifully tragic Shakespeare play or something simply incredible like Hawking's Point of Singularity. Or something so profound yet so insignificant, like a tiny little fly trapped in a spider web. Yeah, some flak like that. I could probably BS my way through coming up with a metaphor for death o hopelessness or despair but seriously—get over your inner drama queen. Where I am, Stephen-fucking-Hawking has no relevance, and neither do stupid little insects, and Romeo and Juliet split up and moved on with their lives. Suck it up. There is no metaphor that can convey to your dopamine-soaked brain what it feels like to be truly starving and sleep-deprived because there are people with AK-47s on your ass. There is no comparison you can fathom to watching everything around you dissolve into dust. To see sky scrapers falling like they were golf tees. What could you tell me? What could you possibly tell me? Sure, it's good to feel things, and if it hurts, we're doing it to ourselves, so says a Richard Silken #quote. But there should be a different story here. There should be a different story about a different world where things changed for the better, and I am what I was: an mostly-innocent kid in a mostly-screwed-up world. I am not that kid in this story. In this true story. Not anymore. People can change, they say, and they're right. But people can also break, break like defective glow sticks that don't shine when you crack them. So I guess I'll begin this story at that moment, when I broke. When I finally understood how the person you would take a bullet for could be the one about to pull the trigger.