The average life expectancy in America is 78.74 years. That’s about 28,740.1 days, 689,762.4 hours, 41,385,744 minutes, or 2,483,144,640 seconds. But that’s just it. Seconds can go by and you can feel more than you have felt in years. Time can’t measure happiness. I know that now. A boy can show you what it means to love, and still leave. A mother can teach you patience, without having any. A teacher can show you a way out of struggle, this was is called poetry. God can show you life and death, and still give you a choice between them. You may learn, the way I did, that death is not something to be fearful of. Death is a turning point in your life. Like a parabola. Death is the vertex. After that, it’s all downhill from there. (It is a negative parabola in this case (;) Death cannot be rushed, nor should it be feared. It just is. Before I die, I want to live. Not exist; I mean live. I want to run through a field of brightly colored flowers. I want to watch the sunrise at 5am beneath a willow tree, curled up in blankets. I want to run down the streets of New York singing at the top of lungs. I want to travel to Alaska and photograph the entire trip, and scrapbook it all when I get home. I want a home, not just a house. I want a family, not just people with high expectations and short tempers. I want to go on a Caribbean Cruise with my best friend. I want to meet new people. I want to go to Jamaica and buy a poor old man off the street a meal. I was to start a conversation with the lady at the grocery store who has been working there for longer than I’ve been alive. I want to learn not by force, but by choice. I want to receive as high of an education as I possibly could, and use that education every day at a job helping others. I want to work at this job so much that I leave exhausted but accomplished. I want to marry my soulmate and have children. I want to teach them to live their lives with happiness, and that regret is better than wondering “what if I had done…”  I want to grow old on the outside, but for my heart to remain young. I hope that when I do die, I have done all the things I promised myself I would do. I hope I have forgiven myself for the not so good things I was done too. I just hope that in this one life of mine, I hope that I make it.