I'd argue that the growth of a person is to compare one's further actions to one's current actions, the only problem with this utterly flawless theory is perspective: You now know how the event played out, and with this, you can argue subconsciously that if you were to take the smaller, or larger, risk, things would've been different.
And yet, as I sit here, time doing that one thing it always does, I allow myself a moment of reprieve: What if? What if I reached out to a publisher? What if I decided, against my better judgement, to put my work into the world? What if, after all the trouble I'd gone to, this book ends up as a forgotten ode, a passage of a missing time?
Then I remember: Beautiful things don't ask for attention, and art doesn't ask to be seen. It simply asks to be sculpted into reality. Maybe one day I'll publish this book. Maybe one day I'll see my book in someone's hand, and maybe someone will stop and say "That's the guy who wrote Dead Zone."
Maybe. So many wonderful and wounding ideas start with a maybe, don't they?
I leave you with a question: If I, someone who started writing this book once they were 17, and only now at the age of 21 are beginning to truly try and indulge it, can finish their maybe, what's stopping you?
I hope, one day, that maybe you hold close to your chest becomes a reality.
