5th/Joy And #life is good again. It's surprising where one can find love: in the most unlikely places, where you don't think to look, it can be there. I made a new friend, who I quickly learned was a friend in need. I did everything I could for her, we talked and talked for hours through the night. I remember telling myself that I would have done it for any of my friends. I might well have done, but this was different. She was special. I think perhaps I should mention that I am bisexual. I am attracted to guys and girls in equal measure; I make little distinction between the genders when it comes to people I know I like, and I think that's a good way to live. Since I fell hard out of a relationship a few months ago, I hadn't been dating. I fended off a few advances because I didn't feel ready. I had been hurt badly; I was wary, not wanting to open myself up again for fear of being bitten again. I'm not afraid of it any more. I have found a girl who needs me just as much as I need her, a person who I fell for in a matter of days over a few chance meetings. She has a dark past, been through emotional suffering nobody should have to endure. I was cautious, caring; it was a while before we realised that we both felt the same way about each other. We fell into each other, pure joy and elation at each other's mere presence. I am happier just being around her than I ever have been with any other person, male or female. I do not agree with the idea that there is one perfect person for all of us. I think that love is real, that certain individuals may indeed be perfect for each other, but I don't think that there can be only one love for each of us. I believe that given time, two people can shape each other into exactly what they want. In this way, we make our own happiness. This post is short, because I have little time. In the first throes of romance, there rarely is much space to breathe. But I am happy. Be happy. The Fallen Has Risen.

4th/Exist Philosophy has long been an interest of mine. Questioning the universe, our own selves, the possibility of something beyond our realm of existence; I find it all at the same time overpoweringly grand but beautifully comforting. We are but the merest pinpoint dot of consciousness in the unconquerable vastness of the cosmos, adrift in the dark without so much as a clue from whatever put is there. Was it God? Was it chance? Perhaps we were designed uncountable billions of years ago by an ancient race of beings beyond our very comprehension, shelved long ago, nothing but a failed experiment. Maybe we were once the mightiest species in the galaxy, forced downwards into devolution by forces that felt we has grown too powerful for our own good. The theories are very nearly endless. The philosopher Rene Descartes theorised that it may be impossible for us to prove, using physical evidence, that the world around us exists as we sense it. Descartes is perhaps best known for his famous #quote, "I think, therefore I am". We can arrive at the conclusion that we exist simply because we cannot imagine ourselves not existing, but that doesn't mean that we have to exist as we believe ourselves to. We choose to trust in our sense because it is easier than the alternative, which would be to doubt anything and everything we see, hear, touch, taste, smell. Wherever you are right now, lie down, flat on the floor. Look up. Register what is above you; a sky, a ceiling; picture its details in your mind. Close your eyes, and imagine what is above you is still there, existing, as perceivable by you as it is by anyone else. Now open your eyes. Is it still there? It should be. If it isn't, I'm afraid you might be insane. If it is, ask yourself this question: How can you be sure that it was still there when your eyes were shut? How do you know, regardless of anybody else or any other sense at your disposal, that it was still visible to you while your eyelids covered your eyes You don't. So even if we trust our senses to be true, we can never be certain of the very existence of that which we cannot sense. And since we can't sense everything, how can we be sure of this world's true existence? Another experiment for you: Imagine the face of your closest friend. If they are with you, all the better. Imagine the place you feel the most comfortable. If you are there, all the better. Now try to imagine that those things don't exist. Try to imagine that you don't exist, picture nothing but oblivion in your mind, no physical reality or mental thought, no ideas or emotions. It's impossible: we can't imagine nothing, because we ourselves are something. I find that oddly soothing, that there is no possibility of nothingness within our minds. So we can lie to ourselves, tell ourselves that we are worthless within the colossal unfathomability of the universe, or we can choose to believe. Believe that we are each fortunate, fortunate that we each have the ability to imagine something other than nothing. I don't seek a Creator: I know that we are all creators, all capable of the simple feat of imagination. It is this that brings us innovation, ingenuity, emotion. Without this, we could not love. I love, and I have loved, therefore I am. Live. Love. Because even if we are the most infinitesimal smidgeon of reality upon the petri dish of existence, we still matter.

3rd/Watch I watch people. So many pay little attention to the actions their bodies take. You have a lot of free time when you don't sleep; some of it I used to study behavioural psychology. It's a fascinating if imprecise science, having helped me out on a number of occasions. Little motions, invisible if you don't know where to look for them, can reveal emotions hidden from view, or reinforce those that are expressed. I look at some of my friends and see confusion, happiness, sadness, anger, true love. It serves as a constant reminder of our ever-shifting lives. Love is quite the thing to see. I always like to observe as a close couple spot each other down a busy street or across a crowded coffee shop: irises dilate, stances shift upwards, smiles break out. Sometimes you can even see their breathing speed up a little, excitement in emotion displaying itself in the tiny ways of our subconscious mind. Heartbeats rise. Eyes dart. Arms and legs uncross. It's a true thing of beauty, the way our bodies speak to each other without us even needing to use words. I have often wondered what it would be like to control pheromones. Our power to interact with each other using invisible chemicals secreted from beneath our skin would be quite the ability if we could control it with any intentional degree of accuracy. We pick up on the traces drifting in the air around us, sensing emotions left in the wake of friend and stranger alike. Seduction, manipulation, subterfuge, trickery, the simple way one might convince another to play their way. The subtle, elegant subtext of chemicals and body language underpins everything we say and do, a perfect completeness in our actions. Everything I sense, I act upon. I may be at fault for that: I can't sit on information that matters to me if I could use it to help another, but at the same time I drive myself down by suppressing my own feelings, my angers and uncertainties. Here is an example from my #life: My two oldest friends are two young men called Chris and Nick. I have literally known them since birth: our mothers shared a maternity ward. We went to the same nursery, the same primary school, followed the same trends and lived through the same events. Since traversing the bridge between primary and secondary education, I dropped my old friends and took on new ones, but they stayed. We went to separate schools, and it made no difference. We remained good friends, meeting at night and on the weekends for games of paintball, snowboarding, skydiving, fun. I hadn't heard from Chris for a little while, when three months ago I was talking to Nick and he dropped an alarming piece of information. Chris' #life had fallen apart: his girlfriend had left him, he failed his final exams, his parents divorced. He had sunken into #depression. Two police officers had dragged him, kicking and screaming and biting and swearing, off a trainline in Kent, following a failed suicide attempt. I did not sit on the information. Not 48 hours after hearing this, I kicked his bedroom door down and yelled at him until he got out of bed, dressed for the first time in days and begrudgingly got into a car borne for our closest paintball ground. We played for a full day, and we had fun, and we talked. Me and him and Nick, oldest friends, talking through every problem that had beset each of us. I had recently called out of love; Nick's parents divorced when he was young. We showed Chris that he was not alone. Chris made an astonishing recovery after our day of intervention. It has been only a few months, but he's off his antidepressants, he's attending university and he got himself a decent job, working part-time for Royal Mail. I'm proud of what I did, and I know that I only did it because I couldn't leave knowledge alone, not without acting on it, not without making it right. And that's exactly what we did. So watch your friends closely. Too many people suffer in silence, even from the minor issues that nobody should have to worry about. There is a saying: 'a problem shared is a problem halved'. It's not true. Sharing a problem won't fix it. The only thing that any of us can say with any certainty is that a problem shared is a problem shared. Call this a meaningless tautology if you will, but I still believe that a problem shared is better than a problem kept bottled up inside. Watch others. Someday, you might be glad that they watched you back.

2nd/Dreams I find my own dreams utterly impenetrable. As a long-time sufferer of insomnia, I sleep little, and even when I do I rarely remember my dreams. The ones I do recall fall under two equally peculiar categories: either they are as #lifelike as my mind can make them, occasionally causing me great consternation when I wake up, having 'lived' an entire day in my dreams, only to find that a day in the real world is just waiting for me. My other dreams are something different altogether. Surreal and vivid, they always manifest themselves from odd thoughts conjured in the back of my mind. When I was a child I was plagued by a recurring nightmare in which a creature I could never describe would attempt to steal the last letter of my name, upon which I would chase it through a field of grass and eggs until I woke up. Most recently, I was deeply troubled by a curious dream that felt, having woken, to have lasted for weeks; I could remember important sections of time that felt spaced, like looking back on a week from several months ago. In this dream, a girl who I have long been good friends with suddenly contracted a rare form a cancer. I can remember sitting by her bedside, bringing a television to her hospital room so that we could see together in the dark and watch her favourite anime together for hours. I gathered some of our friends and we raised a great amount of money from sponsored events and charity collections, eventually six of us swimming across the English Channel to raise more money for her treatment. I remember running in to the ocean and coming out the other side, walking in my wetsuit up a French beach. I took the girl out of hospital when she was well enough, and together we went skydiving, jetskiing, we learned a martial art and fought each other until she was too tired to go on. Her head was shaven. I watched her being tested, fed into machines with doctors swarming over her. Holding her hand. And then, at the end of it all, I sat alone in the reception of Pembury hospital as a doctor came and told me that she had died in the night; the one night I had not stayed and slept on the floor by her side. I left, got on a bus and went home, sat in my room when no-one was around and I cried. I rarely cry about anything, let alone emotional turmoil, but I know now that if I lost her, it would destroy me. I woke up. It was strange, dropping back into consciousness. Getting up, out of bed. Seeing her the very next day, saying 'hi' and 'how was your weekend?' as though it mattered to her. I was scared by this dream. Did it mean something? Nothing? Everything? I didn't tell her, didn't let it change anything between us. Sometimes I wonder if I should have. But a dream is just that: a dream. And our dreams should stay within our minds, so we can live out real lives amidst this crazy world.

1st/Chaos Entropy exists everywhere, chaos swirling all around us, engulfing our pathetic delusions of order and control as easily as two swift fingers might extinguish a candle's flame. We lie to ourselves as much as to each other, as though meaningless tautologies ("you'll meet her when you meet her") will somehow make any difference to our never-ending hunt for happiness. Happiness itself is a curious concept. How constantly we search for it, a million ways to attain it, a hundred we might try. Science might try to explain it; chemicals in our brain; dopamine, adrenaline, endorphin release. I know that when I throw myself from a plane speeding far above the ground, clothed in my wingsuit with a parachute strapped to my back, the rush of the drop blasts my senses and I feel alive. Alive is merely alive. Simply living is overrated; real happiness isn't found in biological mathematics, but in emotional pulses that might take months or years before they rise to the thunderous surfaces of our minds. I do not subscribe to the concept that every single person has one single person waiting out there for them. I can't possibly afford to. I fell from what I thought was happiness with a girl not too long ago. What I do believe is altogether more complex. Given enough time, any two people could come to desire nothing more than the company of the other, regardless of their origins, for all we need in #life is time. Time is unstoppable: the only force that may bring about the end of anything by it's mere passing. We each possess a finite amount, growing closer to the end at a definite rate of one second per second, so is it not pointless to allow that time to trickle away unlived? "People never change" is a lie in the purest sense, utterly false under both empirical evidence and perceived thought. It doesn't take much time for every cell in each of our bodies to die and birth anew, until we are just a different collection of molecules that just happens to look like us. And we change emotionally too, every little event in our minor lives shaping us, forming us into the people we needed to be. If two people stay with each other, eventually the change will become nothing more than a bond between them, a bond that grows stronger with every passing minute together. It's out there. Happiness is waiting for us, we just need to he brave enough to take the leap. And if we fall, it means nothing but that we will rise back up. I'll find happiness. And if you look for it, so will you. Goodnight.