Against All Odds.

Everything that I have ever done, I have tried to justify for myself. I have tried to explain to myself why I am doing it and what will become because of it. Every lie I have ever told I have vindicated to myself, until all I am doing is rewriting that lie over and over until it sounds right. I have always found somebody else to blame when deep down, I've made more mistakes than anybody that I have ever known. I've made more mistakes.

I've never been sure. I've never been able to put my pen down and say that I know what the answer is because I have always believed, somewhere deep down, somewhere beneath every time I've told somebody that I am right, that I am probably not right. That I am possibly, probably wrong. That I have probably always been wrong every time I have ever felt sure of anything. I have had notions throughout my whole life, single nights when I think I have discovered a brand new part of myself, and the next morning I have woken up to find that, sometime during the night, when I was sleeping and my attentions were diverted, that that part of me had died before I'd even really acknowledged its existence. I've spent my whole life mourning the empty spaces of my soul like there is something better that should be filling them, like there's always something more. I've wasted years pretending that one day I am going to find myself in this whole new place, where none of this will matter, and then I have been spat out into a new day which made all those years seem like just one hour. Like I could have just compressed every single mistake, every error and miscalculation, into that one hour, and that I could compress all the years that I have spent trying to correct them into maybe a day, a weekend at most. And I'd just be in this whole new place - none of it would matter anymore. It'd be against the odds - against all odds, but nothing is impossible. Nothing is impossible.

When I put my pen down on a page full of equations and formulae I know that I should not be letting that pen part with my fingertips. I know that somewhere in the calculations, I will have missed something, something tiny. A positive that should be a negative, a square root that should be a square, or a bracket that embraces more than its fair share. I know that if I could just re-read what I have written once, or even twice, that I could spot that mistake and I could make it right, that I could end up with what I want and what I need - I could find what I have been looking for. Maybe that's what I'm doing now. I'm faltering while my fingertips are terminating contact with that pen, because I am scared. I'm scared that I will have made too many errors already, that I won't find them all and correct them in time and that I will still not get what I need to make this work. I am scared that you'll find a flaw I didn't see, a mistake I didn't even know I was making. Something so tiny but so crucial, something that could throw the balance and ruin everything. I'm scared that I won't know and that you will know. I'm scared because this is the most important equation that I have ever had to solve - and I have to now, I have no choice. If I don't solve it then maybe I never will - maybe I will spend the rest of my life trying to find X and Y until something bigger comes up, until there is an n and a billion terms to decipher. This is my one shot.

I have a million reasons to look up into the headlights and let them blind me. I have a million reasons to be scared and a million reasons to just make another mistake. I could just drop this pen right now and give up because that would be the easy thing to do. Because if I don't try to solve this logically and reasonably, then I cannot fail to. That's all I'm scared of. I'm just scared of fucking up. But I'm going to hold on. I am going to grip that pen like it is part of my body itself, like if I let it go I will have lost a limb. A limb I have lost before and cannot afford to lose again. I'll grip it like this terror is gripping me and pass on any doubt and any fear that I have until it all spills out onto this page in a million integers and symbols that my brain no longer understands.

I need something solid that I can carve into stone and wake up next to every morning so that I know that nothing has died overnight. I need something heavy and certain that I can lift up and feel it pulling the muscles in my arms and shoulders, something that will remind me that it is most certainly, most undoubtedly real. I need the curve of your back when you sit with your legs crossed and the lines in the palms of your hands when you trace out the maps of your past and future lives. I need the vapour on your lips at 3 in the morning in the freezing cold and I need the streetlights on the road outside your house to keep you awake so that there won't be a minute when you'll forget. I need the creases in the corners of your eyes when you smile and the lump in your throat when you don't know what else to say. I need your fingertips and the veins in your arms, I need the dilating pupils in your eyes and the drums in your ears and I need your lungs. I need you to look after them so that you'll always have enough air to scream and shout and sing when that is what you need to do. I need more reasons than I have already, I need the biggest discovery of my life, the longest, hardest equation that I have ever solved to rearrange itself on my page.

I need to fast forward to a time when I'll be able to tell you about those reasons without us being afraid anymore. I need to realise that there are no logical reasons to be found, that you are my only reason. You are all my reasons.