There are times that I feel like I'm going to break with the sheer vastness, grand size of it all. When these feelings are so much bigger than the little body I've been given, feelings that encompass everything, like rose-tinting that seeps into my peripheral vision, a xylophone tuning reverberating through my ears. I can't contain myself, and just when I think I've reached the point of bursting, it grows larger still, and I'm baffled by the fact that I'm still here, somehow intact when I should be strewn to pieces, like a dandelion that's come into contact with a wind too strong and it can do nothing but fall apart. I only pray that my demise is as graceful, as fluid, as mesmerizing as those individual seedlings that float away, drifting back once or twice, as if to indicate their sadness for leaving, but then going along anyway because they know they must.

I will dance with the wind, frankly, I have to, my life depends on it. Because the thought of bursting is intoxicating, revolutionary. I welcome these feelings because that is what it is to live. I want to breathe every breath and taste it on my tongue, to hold the smell in my body and file it away in my mind, labeling it perfectly so that I will never forget it, not even when I'm old, cranky, and bespectacled. I want to touch it all, feel it all on the tips of my fingers. To hell with being prim and proper. I want to see my fingerprints on surfaces that will be wiped down the moment they are noticed, because, for that small amount of time, there was proof that I, in all my grubby glory, was there. That is invigoration, that is curiosity, and that, my friends, is life.