“So what if it doesn’t work out?”
“I never said it would. I will.”

Dear everyone and everything I left behind: -

I check the motor, the lights, the brakes and tires. Everything looks good… I smile, as if I had any idea what made a car go.

:There is a measure of symbolism involved in this that I feel… welling inside me, it’s growing. This is something that I don’t think I can craft into words… This is life.

“Tell me why you have to go. Put it into words.”
“That’s just it I can’t! Words haven’t been invented that define this! It isn’t even a reason it’s just a feeling and no one has been able to describe it yet… I think that’s it. I think this is the thing that people, every person has been trying to define and describe since the beginning of time, every time a self help author writes to try to explain something bettering and something profound about this world, every poet, every great writer of the human spirit has tried to capture this thing this monster [boxed up] inside of us and no has ever gotten it right on but they feel it, we all feel it. Every human being on earth feels this one thing, and none of us can say just what it is… but we know that the only time we feel really, truly alive is when we throw ourselves into it…”

Everything always smelled the same, this car, the road, the gas stations with the road maps and snack foods and soda. The smeared interior of the vehicle, my home for the next few days, dusty and settled. Tired.

:As I’ve lived I’ve talked a lot of what I hate to admit is philosophy about [growing up] and about being oneself, and realizing purpose by creating it for yourself. I have tried, in every instance, to explain myself to you. Some of you have heard me, some of you listened. Some of you even understood…

“I don’t consider it a mistake, rather just a risk. Which is close I guess… I risk is a mistake with fine print. A risk is a mistake with the possibility of success.”

:All of the speaking and all of the explanation and all of the help is at an end now.

I have always loved that sound of finality when a car door shuts, clamping out the air and the noise and the world and nothing is left but the motionless silence of the interior… a quiet that you cannot find in any other place. As if the air is holding it’s breath.

:I do not expect for people to feel a monstrous, gaping hole in my absence. I do not expect for there not to be any hole whatsoever either. I expect nothing. I am more than aware of what impacts I have made and in what people. I know what my leaving means to them. But they don’t. I cannot say that people have been or will be permanently changed because of my time here. I wouldn’t assume such things…

“You’re leaving me.”
“Everyone says it that way you know?”
“What way?”
“I’m leaving everyone, you know? But no one ever says ‘You’re leaving everyone.’ Everyone either says ‘You’re leaving me.’ Or they haven’t said anything about it at all…”

:But I can hope…

There’s a difference between accepting something… and embracing something. The difference is whether or not you let that something exist in your world.

:In these recent weeks I’ve felt so much more strongly the holes I’m leaving unfilled. Often in people. Not holes that I’d ever fill by being there. But holes that I’d been trying to fill with something else that some just never latch onto… Self-worth. I will no longer be able to do this…

You know no matter where you go, you’ve always got to take yourself with you.

:You are worth what you believe. I want everyone who reads this to know that I have never asked anything of you. I want everyone who reads this to know that I leave this place without a single requested debt unpaid. I want everyone who reads this to know that I cannot find it in myself to leash myself to that place, nor to even connect with what I had in it at all. I’m troubled by the idea of even remembering…

“As much as I love you all and I do, and as great as you all are, and you are… there is still so much more in this place that I struggle against, than there is that struggles with me.”

:I have made a meager name for myself amongst you. In Webb City, and amongst names such as Kristin Mullins, Meghan Colvard, Ashley Henard, Ryan Boyer, Alyssa Stuart, Kaity Bachert, Codi Phillips, Kari Davis, Analee Arteaga, and many others… I am proud of this fact and I am proud of these people and what I have seen in them. There is not a single person in that list and even those that I haven’t mentioned that I do not pray great things for. These are the ones I was close to. These people, I would call family. I am proud. And I will not be ashamed nor will I apologize for my pride neither in these people nor in myself. Humility is the forebearer of shame.

Never be ashamed of what you honestly, truly are.

:We hear so often that humility is admirable, honorable, responsible even… And we hear likewise that to be proud is vice. But the forbearer of pride is self-worth, and self-worth is what compels bravery, and bravery is what creates actions which shape and shift lives in such a world as this. Be proud. Forget your humility, forget being humble or meek. Take pride in yourself and in what you do. You are worth something. The world is changing… and the meek molt in their humility.

You see for us, raised as we were and told the stories we were told and delivered the moral guidance that we were given and led, as we were, by example, we can still so often we confused because out of all the guidance we were given… no one ever taught us that in real life we have to pick our parables.

:We are told that we live in a world of absolutes, of concretes and that these are the things with which we must learn to eventually cope and deal and compromise. We are told that up is up, that down is down, and that gravity favors the latter above the former. We are told what is possible and what is impossible and it is proven to us in the method of a clinical, irrefutable science. We are told that the universe has rules and we’re told what we are capable of and what we’re able to do and we’re encouraged to throttle out there and fight against the odds and make something of ourselves. Find our niche and settle in. The Universe stands with it’s obstacles like an immovable wall against which we must build the foundations of our world.

You see for us, we’re never asked to make choices about what we believe, about what we’re made for and where we’re going. We are told these things. And one of the hallmarks of this experience is realizing that two of the things we’ve been told and believed… contradict. And the illusion is that the choice is between one contradictory belief and the other and it’s not, it’s not at all… the choice that matters is to decide that it matters if those beliefs conflict and to change them- or to believe anyway.

:I’ll tell you nothing like that at all. What I’ll tell you is much different… I’ll tell you that you can be an absolute, a concrete force with which the universe must be forced to cope. I will tell you that you are the unstoppable force with which the universe must contend. It can be made to bend around your will, rather than the antithesis. “But what of the facts and the figures and the laws and the rules! What of the science!?”

“Oh hell Michael, given the right perspective anything can be a fact. I can prove to you that chess is a racist game because it uses black and white pieces. Are you going to prove me wrong?”

:Science will prove one thing in the morning and disprove it before the evening. Science tells me something new and ridiculous every day. Science told me that the world was flat, then that it was round, and neither mattered to me, and neither effected me. I decided the world was the shape of a cigar and the horizon looked no different. I refuse to trust anything presented to me in the name of science. Science is inadequate. But I believe… Belief does not require proof, it is above proof which is what makes it so very powerful.

If something does not exist, and if one person pretends that it does and reacts to it, what power have a thousand scientists who prove it nonexistent, but do not react at all?

:When you come across the immovable wall it stops you, but only if you let it.

I know how God is immortal.

:I mean this motion with all my heart, mind, and soul… and with something else inside me that I cannot explain in these futile words. Something more powerful than all the obstacles which would come against me. This is a journey and the movement is not unlike any other journey. People make them every day and through distances far greater than I am traveling… [travel], alone it means nothing. The world hurls itself at thousands of miles per hour through space and not an eye blinks in interest but it’s the meaning of a journey that exists in more real a way than the journey itself. A thing is only worth what worth a person gives it.

“And it hits everyone at some point and when you feel it you just… you have to move! And I don’t mean move as in up to new york and taking all of your stuff you might not even leave your own house but if you’re sitting you’ll stand and if you’re standing you start walking if you’re walking you’re running and you don’t have any idea where but you know you just can’t sit still anymore! You have to move.”

:I mean my whole self into this. I mean everything into this. As far back as I can remember I have existed I have never meant anything more in my entire existence…

I’m finally… flying.