I don’t know if that oath I swore at seventeen became a privilege or a curse.

Carrying that age still inside me is tearing me apart now. Too much emotion for a grown heart, too many roller coasters, too much breath caught in my chest. And if I could go back, would I accept a dulled life—warm embers instead of fire, a quiet surrender to everything? Only if it were possible, which it isn’t, unless I numbed myself with something chemical. And I can’t. I never wanted that, I don’t want it now. This heart burning furiously is consuming me physically, and I don’t know how much longer I’ll last.

The world is full of priests preaching acceptance of what is. Yet inside, I know wisdom can also include this choice: trading a little time, a few years that would otherwise drift uselessly in numb survival. Dare, dare, dare. Risk it all, and in return receive screams, rage, wild life, boiling blood that races at full speed—not still waters whispering in silence. But is it allowed? Is it blasphemy? It surely makes you despised by most. Few friends, often resentful ones.

Still, I need to explain. Because I almost never explain, and that keeps me in a constant state of alert. To live serenely, time must unfold in a straight line. The past should fade gradually, wrap itself in a protective fog that makes pain bearable but also muffles the force of what was beautiful. Fog is never selective.

But if instead you gather every moment when your heart was gripped in a vice—good or bad—the sudden deaths, the searing unrequited loves, the unbearable empathy for others’ suffering, the man who steals your breath when his hand brushes yours for the first time, the dive off the rocks when you decide to leap even at the risk of dying, the weight of a single moment as if it were the only one you’d ever live.

And you pile them all together, stacked like sheets of tissue paper, erasing the timeline. The intensity of what could have been almost outshines what is, because it holds every possibility without the dead weight of daily life trying to slow your reckless race toward the surrender of this physical adventure you’ve undertaken.

All of it overlaps with what’s real, not diminishing it but making it too vivid—like unbearable light, like scents seeping into every corner of your life. Does the storm only make sense if it doesn’t last forever? Emotion or balance? Losing control or taking control? And at what price. I won’t pay it.