highway 17 west like a falling star

You know, people romanticize death. Especially in a place like this, where you scream out your trauma and curse out your injustice and someone tosses out some fresh breath in the name of somethin’ funny. A lot of people here talk about death, and rightly so, because it is not so much the unknown we wish for but the ending, the beautiful, glorious, bloodstained ending.

Because the falling star is not loved for when it fades but for how it burns out so bright. Because we keep trying to die, and stepping back at the final moment, because damn it, you never feel so alive as the moment right before you die, and that moment of feeling is enough to want to do it all over again. We talk it like we're addicted to death, to the end, but we're not, we're not, we're not.

I think there ain't a damn person here who wants to die. I think there's a lot of fuckin' people here who want to be alive. Nobody wants to just exist and drift through and bump into things like a lazy current on a summer's day. Half the people here want a moment to breathe and the other half wants to shatter the fucking mediocrity like the prison it really is. You wanna live and you wanna breathe and you don't want half the damn pain - you want to feel, or you want to stop feeling, it's zero-percent or a hundred-and-fifty and a goddamn equilibrium would be fucking nice for once, and everything dies, so maybe that's the only time to escape or to burn out bright.

In the escape, you burn out bright. You got out, you're free, but did you ever ask "what now?" 'Course, there is no 'what now' if you're dead, everyone knows that. But when you say you'll die before you graduate, and you believe it for five years straight, and the next thing you know. And the next thing you know it's September again, and you've lived two months longer than you ever planned to.

There's an irony in that, somewhere, living when you never really expected to, and here you are, and is it borrowed time if you've overstayed your welcome? And you know what, it's time to ask "what now". Write another damn poem. Look up and look around, the date's gone by and you're out of school for good and suddenly you feel so damn lost.

Falling stars burn out bright, and here you are, on the ground for the first time. No bright ending, no glorious death, no sudden bloodstained fleeting moment of life and emotion. Just... ground.

Look up. Look around. Can't die bright, now. Nobody's watching the ground for a flame that's gone out. Maybe it's time to restart that flame. One choice leads to two leads to four leads to sixteen leads to too fucking many to count, and the idea of existing opens up before you. The path you were on never had a stop, you didn't take the correct offramp anyway. You have to keep moving, time won't stop for a moment to breathe and the winds never slow the fuck down. Maybe it's about time to learn to live bright, and if death never came the first time, maybe you can get that fleeting moment of emotion without it.

Everybody knows Highway Seventeen only goes west these days, and the only way left for me to go is forward.
Let's go.