I'll never remember the day I was born. The day I first walked, I'll never have in mind, or make it a memory I can track back through time. My first day of school, the first smile on my face, the surprise, fear and joy of discovering a whole new world, all these are lost to my consciousness. And yet these first moments have made me who I am, what I am. They have been the ground of my conscious self; they have been the soil of my imaginary worlds; they have fertilised my mind like a pollen of the soul, and like the rain after a drought, they have imbued my world with a vivid sense of life.

Here lies the dirt that's made me. Here stands the house that loves me. Here dwells the soul of the mountain--whose hair the forest, limbs the torrents, eyes the snowy peaks, and breath the valley's wind-- watch over me as I erode my way into life.

Where the spirits go round and round under the moonlight, where the beauteous stars twinkle in dissonant dances of destituted youths, there I grow into a tree and find my mythic voice, and begin telling the stories behind this my life choice.

Becoming a young man far away from home, on another continent that looks like another planet, this was scary at first and then became formative. I lost my friends and won them back. I lost my self but that one I never got back: my sense of scale had exploded, and a whole new universe had offered itself to my curious mind. I left as a child, and came back as a man. It's cliché but that's what it was.

In a community where languages no longer separate but bring together, I learned to live with others, to drink with them, to laugh with them and play with them until my words would evaporate in my mouth before I could even speak them. The Irish language is still a mystery to me, despite my immersion in its home country. And yet I cannot but think that some of its essentiality has tainted my eyes shamrock green and my blood guinness brown.

Here I have found independence, where I thought none existed. I have found amour à deux, which is like mass to gravity: something that exists in the abstract language of concrete thinking. Here the dimensions of my self have grown manifold. My prospects have grown deeper and deeper and deeper until the tunnel vision of the landscape of life became a vibrant thread of immaterial matter.

An exile. A journey into the mechanics of introspection. A walk through the forest of thoughts that populate the ecology of my mind. A solitude that lets me feel the vibrations of each and every cluster of life wherein meaning shimmers into sight, wherein voices of the world echo the voices inside.