Late.

Here begins the part of my life where I discover truly who I am, nineteen years late. Here arrives the moment where my life begins for the first time, nineteen years late. The memories to which I held so dear for nineteen years are packed away, organized in boxes, labeled in black ink that bleeds through the cardboard.

I’m sorry, dear friend, that you’ve become number B12 on Box 14, in the back left corner beneath my brother’s bed, but there’s simply nothing else that I can do. Perhaps I’ll take you out of your box one day, dear friend. Everything will be as I left it. I meticulously organized it as to best aid the memory, as to best preserve the moment, as to best precisely recall the dates and the times and the people. But I forget the way the air smelled, and the way the grass felt, and the number of steps it took me to walk to your door. Old friends, I apologize for encoding you, but I can’t remember the way it looks when you smile.

And new friends, all you who I have not yet known long enough to put in boxes, what has become of you all? How time flies for me while you are still living the same lives you had been living before, on the other side of the ocean, on the other side of the river? Who will you be when I return? Who will I be when I return?

I cannot think of that. Not right now. There is a voice that pounds in my ear. There is a drum there too, and the faint sounds of a piano in the background. Is that all that’s left of a stable life I used to know - the voice of this reasonable man, moaning a melody so melancholy through my stereo? He claims his sanity, if only to prove it to himself. And I too, I claim my sanity, and I claim my happiness. Do you believe it? I do.

I didn’t used to believe in it. I couldn’t. Not in that place. Not in the place where rivers burn under a polluted sky. Not in the place where I worked so hard to learn of the past, all while I destroyed myself in order to forget the present. Not in the place that banished me for what I thought, and what I think, and what I will always think.

Oh, I could get angry. I could blame you and your incompetence, Mr. President. I could shake my fists at those who made me that way. I could shout and yell at those who were never there for me, no matter how much they falsely claimed their unconditional love. Oh, I’ll show them. I’ll change the world from this side of the ocean. I’ll learn more than I ever did before. I’ll succeed, and spit in their faces.

Or, the voice and I could stay together, forever, alone, sane, happy, and alive. Do you believe that we could do it? I do. Perhaps you will never believe it. I don’t think pictures can encapsulate it. I don’t think words can express it. Maybe I should stop trying, stop trying to express a fact that is, in fact, inexpressible. Instead, I will write nonsense. I will write if only to ridicule myself. I will write what you will never understand. But where will I go in the midst of this chaos?

My words sound so sad, this I know. But can’t you see it? Can’t you see? Can’t you see that I’ve changed, that I’m alive now? Of course, you’ll say. Of course you’re happy. You smile. Of course you’re alive. You always have been. But you’re wrong! Smiles don’t prove emotion, and heartbeat doesn’t prove existence. How to prove it. How to prove it. How to prove it.

Will silence work? Or perhaps words? Lyrics? If I can compress my life to airport regulation checked baggage size, surely I can compress my emotion to the lyrics of a song. Surely. Or surely not.

I suppose I’ll have to suffice with the voice coming through my earphones. He can speak for me. He moans, but am I the only one to hear his heartbeat behind that awful sound? Perhaps he is not in pain. Perhaps he is not sad. Perhaps he is not dying. Perhaps it is just the opposite. He is alive, and he is happy, and no one hears it. And that, my friends, is even worse.

One can scream one’s pain, and the world will cry to the sounds of one’s bleeding. One can croon one’s lust, and the world will giggle under sheets to the sounds of one’s breeding. But happiness? How does one say that? I simply do not know the words.

For now, I will resort to silence. And perhaps one day, I will smile, and you will hear that music that I’ve never known how to make - music in a major key, music with a happy melody, music that doesn’t make you cry tears of sadness, but tears of joy. All those who I’ve buried in boxes beneath my brother’s bed will come out of their dusty memorial graves and look at the one whom they so often scorned, whom they so often ignored, whom they so often questioned, and they will know.

I am sane, I swear. And I am happy. It’s just nineteen years late.