2003 It's funny how life gets you sometimes. All you have to do is take a look around, to just inhale and you're there, spinning, catapulted into an ominous unknown. And it's here where you quiver in shame, here where you start to imagine, here where you learn to fly, to fall among the lies and twisted hate that once formed bitter memory and to pray that you don't fall forever- and yet- never hit the smooth rock bottom of regret. Can I tell you how to fly? No. But hey, I can give it a shot, right? Right. It starts with hope. That's what I've learned, at least, that you've got to immerse yourself in some grand symphony of pain in order to discover your hope, sleeping deep within. It is a voiceless calling, a chant, a melody that downright refuses to remain outside the entrance to your mind, a beckoning that avoids negotiation and compromise, in fear of lesser things. It is hope that eats you up, hope that grabs you by the wrists and screams, "YOU! You are better than this." And it is this hope that hangs, that oozes down your spine until you remember. God, you remember. This wasn't the way it always was. And patience, I cry, patience is the ghost that provokes an inclination to silence. Forever silence. So do not let yourself sleep soundly. Do not let yourself breathe another rush of wind or smell another harmony until you swear to keep it, until you guard it in your mind and heart as fiercely as if it were your very life, promising that, by God, you will never let go. You may never fully understand its meaning, its definition, but that life is the only thing that you will ever possess on your own, swimming with the limited freedom that laughs in your struggle to be. And the minute you loosen your grip, the minute you let that life fall like sand between your fingers, like water that cries down your back, like ice that melts inside forgotten boots left by the fireplace, the minute you let yourself be eaten away is the day, no, the second you are blown away to nothing. That is when you are lost. That is the time when you forget who you are and what you're made of. Never forget what you're made of. But someday, no matter how strong you may be, no matter how hard you try to look inevitability in the face as you stand, firmly rooted in the ground, you will forget. And when you do, when you lose your golden track of greatness, when you don't recall the taste of blood inside your mouth or the scream of sweat as it glides down the side of your face, when you forget it all, you will fall. You will fall and I cannot teach you how to rise again. But I can breathe, I can breathe and smile and touch a star and grasp a little hope, and then I'll sing faith and I'll wish and I'll pray, pray that you'll find it among the cinders and the reveries. And that is when I'll dream that you may learn to fly.