My Brothers, Walton and Victor.

  Walton and I never played ball. I have never played soldiers with Victor. I've never known their smiles or their frowns. I've never had the chance to shake my brothers' hands. I do not share their century, the tomes of their libraries, or the clothes on their backs. These men may not have blood same as I, but they are akin to me.
  In truth, there are very few ties between us; I do not have grandiose family or wealth to support my passions. I may not even know of a forbidden science or have planned a mad course for the wilds at the end of the Earth.
  But what anchors my thoughts in their worlds, what asks me to seek glory as they did, what draws me to the air of their time was the only true tie between my Brothers and I. This tie is the desire to find my own reason. A personal reason for being, a way to reason with the world. It's that desire to walk off the beaten path and trudge my own way through the wildernesses of the mysterious dreamscape that is our lives.




  I do not have the wealth or the resources to charter a ship to the frozen unknowns, neither do I have the heart to pull apart the flesh of the deceased and shape a walking corpse. I do not share the knowledge of their forefathers nor will I study their sciences.
  But I have my own black magic and there is a hardship just for me. I've mentors and resources to fuel my imagination and all the ingredients for the recipe of my own making or undoing. I have friends to make and to lose. I have goals to achieve, hazards to meet, tails to chase and beasts to hunt. I've monuments to build and lands to claim. And I'll run through fucking hell and back to make sure I do these things because nothing else will tell me, at the eventual end of my days, that I've done a damn thing.

  Passionate as I am, it all begins with small things. I'm still the guy spending his Saturday nights stenciling images in the opening of an alley on your street. I still have a hard time drawing the same cannon of feminine beauty in the worn out sketch book I bring to school every day. I pack my lunches. The jokes I make with the girls in my classes bomb really badly. I still wear the now-too-small-for-me t-shirts I did in high school.
  But slowly, I begin to understand things and dance a little dance, and before my eyes it all snowballs into the greatest experience I will ever know.


  So, with a little luck, maybe I too will find myself into waters unsought or driven to madness by the creation of my hands one day. And if that day comes, in that fleeting moment in the infinite reality to which we are bound, I might truly know what it means to be.