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.