Everything used to be easy. I never used to cry, I never used to bleed or fight so easy. But then again, I never wanted something so bad in my life. I wanted it more than the latest Barbie doll, the award for best attendance, the newest game system, or the coolest clothes. Everything I ever wanted before in my life never seemed so useless until now. I realized I had spent my life wishing and hoping for things that I didn’t need.

I know, spending hours on the salty seawater coasts on the sandy shores never really helped much either. Or so people would think. But when I would creep down to the shores and bleed colours of my imagination into the ocean and up into the starry skies of the unknown, no one else knew that it always was where I felt I belonged. The high tides would sweep me off my feet like no one before, and God, I found myself out there like nothing before. Those days when I would lay low with the moon and rise with the sun made me discover myself as a person. Those sunny mornings, I would spend under the sunny citrus skies with sand in my hair and in my clothes. However, my hands kept sketching, sketching everything my eyes took in around me; trying to capture images so I could remember every sunset and sunrise I had witnessed, each seemingly so much more beautiful then the previous one.

I just always wanted to discover who I was. I wanted it so bad, I could almost taste it, feel it, grasp it in my hands. But every time I tried, it seemed to slip away, either through the crowded halls of my high school, or out my third floor window, carried up through the air on the wings of a seagull. Anywhere I looked for it, I couldn’t find it. My identity seemed to creep up behind me and tap me on the shoulder when I least expected it. Still, even then, I would try to comprehend the things I couldn’t understand, and my identity once again sneakily slipped through my fingers and under the cracks in the floorboards.

But, the day I finally held it and ingested it, it never left. And where did I find it, you may ask… and I would tell you, I found it on the salty seawater coasts and sandy beaches I sometimes liked to call home.