When it comes to living, I suppose, everyone has a birth date and an end date. Everyone is given a timeline. But they don't know the end date, and so they live as if there is always a tomorrow. I try living like there isn't one, but I'm shy and I'm scared like everyone else. But I do know my end date, roughly speaking. And when you're fifteen and they tell you ten years...that's forever. But when you're nineteen going on twenty and the ten years is half-way up, five years and a couple of months isn't very long at all. So I can't understand why you waste your life and try to end it when you don't have a timeline like that. Wouldn't you want to suck it all up just because you could, because you can?

I tell myself that I'll beat that timeline. I don't think about it much. I try not to because the one wish that really came true was the one I really didn't want. "Send me my Friend or kill me." I guess I did get both but not to the heights that I was really thinking but who really knows what clarifying would have done when it comes to wishes?

Like I always say, I have hope that that date is just a rough estimate that I'll prove wrong. But deep down inside me, I'm beginning to get worried, worried that I won't really live. I'll never know what it's like to have your whole life ahead of you. I'll never know what it's like to be in love or to be loved back. I'll never know what it's like to have a book bound and printed.

So I go out and run in the rain until I have to stop because my heart starts giving out. Then I walk and enjoy the rain slowly. I remember the day I turned sixteen and the way I played guitar under the awning outside in that downpour. Then, when it stopped, the sky opened up and gave me two incredible arches of color sprawled across the itself, one on top of the other. It was the rainbow birthday. And there were nine years left. (Still forever.)

That was the summer the angels fell on me. I aceepted them and wrote the best I'd ever experienced. It was a constant frenzy of inspiration. I was feeling it. There's one reason I create: preservation. There's no time to leave an indelible mark to brand this world with of me. So I write that my being, or a piece of it, may live on after me for as long as Man exists.

I'm done with this day but look forward to a new one. I hope you'll be there, too, when I wake up. And I hope it'll be without regrets because life is for living and it's nice to be able to live like there is no tomorrow while knowing almost full well that there are countless ones ahead.