How can I tell you about myself when I change with every tick of the clock? I am transitive, fluid, just like the world around me; I am no static object to be observed and recorded. The stars aren't twinkling points immovable in the firmament; if I guard them long enough they will escape into the horizon. If I stare into the mirror long enough, I'll have undergone metamorphosis into an entirely new being.

I look through the window in the backseat of the car and I see mountains that I have yet to climb. I see street corners I have yet to stand on, rivers I have yet to wade in, roads I have yet to drive on. I enter bookshops and see the books lining the shelves, the walls, the world, and I want to run my fingers down their spines and break them open and devour all the words within them. Every second is pregnant with possibility. Every point in the Universe is filled with wonder. I long to taste it, to drink it in, and the thought that I can never taste or drink it all doesn't discourage me a bit. In life we exist to experience, but sometimes we must seek out that experience and seize it. We must fight against the dying of the light until the very last breath we expel, and even then we must still be learning, experiencing, living.

Right now I live in September. In the afternoon, the sky grows angry and thunders at me, but I want to mock it by running in the rain until the soles of my bare feet are sore from impact on the asphalt. Soon there will be snow, the first of the season, and I hope that it will be more than a dusty sugar-coating for the world. When I was a child I wrote a story about the first snowfall of September. The heroine had a bed by the window, and when she awoke, she could see nothing but white. She climbed out the window into snow five feet high and dug tunnels in the cold all day. I wanted to write of the beauty of snow, but the words were not in me. Even now, I want to tell you about 2:00 am on a snowy winter night, when I look out my bathroom window at the gleaming sky and see all the white at once coming down in curtains. Words cannot describe the wonders of this life, but still I struggle to do just that.

It is my dream to experience all of the beauty and pain of life, and no career path or college choice can accurately describe that. All of the things I have accomplished up to this moment are only the first tiny steps towards my dream's realization.

One day I want to stand on the South Pole and see the sun devour the horizon. I want to take a deep breath and taste it sear my throat with its icy knives. I know that there will be pain, and I might even acknowledge it, but I will never give in to it. Life will use me, break me, and throw me away, and I will let it. Somewhere inside me there is a being that longs for life more every second past its creation. Somewhere within me there lives a will so powerful that the eternity of my existence cannot break it. I can't touch it now, but I can sense it, traveling in my undercurrents, whispering insurrection in my inner ear. Perhaps this is all there truly is to me: the burning desire to live.