12/7/03 Listen to me. I do not want to let go. I do not want to give up. I do not want to open my hands and feel the pain pulse through and just let you stop me, because I am in control of my life; I own my life; I am in charge of my life, as well as every road that follows it and every decoration that adorns it’s forgotten path. I will not stop writing, I will not stop thinking, I will not stop breathing so that I may satisfy you, simply because you do not control me. Outside it is snowing and I am laughing. I am dancing in this snow like no one has danced before. My blood is flying through my veins and it is making me unstoppable- incorrigible among your tattered shell of death and destruction. But I am flying. I am flying. I am flying and you cannot bring me down. You cannot knock me over, because I am already too high. It is December and the snow is falling and as it falls I am flying, higher and higher, reaching the dreams that we have all forgotten from childhood, soaring above the disbelief and irregularities that we face each day. I am bigger than this, swirling higher into the air, fighting off the snowflakes with each bat of my eyelashes. Bam. Another one down. Another one knocked down and here I am, climbing higher and higher until you cannot see me anymore. Hello down there. I am above you, because I can lick the moon and dance with stars and walk on mountains’ summits and you are falling into the ground, you in your little one-of-a-kind likeness, you who are caught on black construction paper so that you may be brought inside a kindergarten classroom and allowed to melt in half a second. You will drain into that paper and leave a mark no bigger than an ant’s toenail, and I, I will laugh in your face, because as you have chosen to fall to the ground, I have chosen to rise from it, a Phoenix that will never give up, a Master that pushes off the falling objects and propels myself forward, over and over, jumping from flake to flake, into the sky, in through the air, in above the atmosphere until there is nothing left to propel myself off of except for my own determination, my own dignity that never ends, a giving tree that grows endlessly. I will rise. I will rise and rise and rise and you can’t stop me because I will not dare to even stop myself. I will rise and you will fall and we will see who’s going to win. We will see. I will see you when you disappear into that paper and I disappear into the sky and we try to figure out who really crashed first.