When the years of life are piling up and the suffering has found no end, yet.

What god-forsaken thing inside of us keeps us here? Keeps us tied to life? It seems like a kind of ball, a compressed ball of all the unknown things about ourselves. It’s been there all along, whether we were paying attention to it or not. I didn’t even know it was there, keeping me alive, waking me up every morning, no matter what I was faced with. I didn’t even know it was a choice. The unknown just floated there in the center of me, all things swirling around it saying, “I will never give up.” It would just never give up. It was fundamental. It was so fundamental that it was invisible, like the pipes in a house, or the cement foundation under the earth. Life was just alive and living was just what I did. No matter how much it hurt. No matter how much all the voices, the ignorance, and misunderstandings, the harm and “virtuous” malice, the drugs and the gobs of money lost, I was some way of being in it all that said, “I will never give up.”