I’d like to live forever.

I’d like to live the kind of life worth tracing constellations over, the kind that’s more than a momentary flicker in the fabric of the universe. I’d like to be more than a succession of moments, to transcend beyond a sequence of events that outlined every breath and every memory.

Only recently have I fully comprehended the vast insignificance of my existence; a mere inkling on the blimp of a radar that formed into countries and places to belong, of smiling faces and brown skin.

I think that’s why I write.

I’d like to leave behind a piece of myself in words. In everything, I’ve loved. In Passion.

I read a quote once; it talked about how even as the earth will swallow itself whole, even as everything we’ve ever know will whisper into the wind like stardust, art will survive. It will take its arms and open it wide enough to let the draft in just to ask it to stay the afternoon.

I’ve learned, in the two decades I’ve been able to roam the earth, that loneliness breeds creativity. I found despair and heartache akin to wishing wells when it came to my writing; it was a never-ending river of inspiration and ideas (I’ve always wondered why the most profound pieces were almost always written when emptiness became synonymous to living).

I’ve loved poetry and writing ever since I learned what it was like to love something intangible. And in return, it offered a sense of vulnerability — one that I’ve never really truly known, or more accurately, one I’ve turned a blind eye to in fear of being seen as weak. It broke down every guarded wall and peeled every rough armor.

The feeling was never my strongest suit so instead, I bled ink into the margins of Moleskin notebooks and strung words long enough to make clotheslines that connected oceans and continents into mere scribbles on a page. The world was a lot smaller when you looked at it on a piece of paper and because of this, I found myself falling in love with the ability to create something beyond the tangible.

Life had a tendency of sweeping you up in a current just to leave you washed up and alone and I think I’d like to escape oblivion in every sense of the word, save the drowning and the drowned from being roughed up against the tide so long it’ll shape ruins for future generations to call history.

When they look back to how the mountains erupted like supernovas from the ground, they’ll look to the sky and see how the clouds have shaped a timeline of what was. They’ll see a silhouette of every piece of art that has survived the bloodshed of war, the pain of heartbreak, the raw passion for life; it carries with it other pieces of worlds and eras otherwise gone, salvaged from obscurity.

Because of this, I want my soul to come alive in stanzas and metaphors and words meant to make an impact — to light the fire, start an inferno, and burn in my passion eternally.