I turn nineteen tomorrow. It should feel like a bigger deal to me, but it doesn’t. It feels like just another day in my life is coming up.

So many people have never lived to see nineteen. Mortality has been on my mind as of late, mainly due to family affairs, but especially after yesterday. While we were driving on the highway, we saw a reckless motorcyclist whizz by us—not the least common sight, though most of the time it’s a car instead of an exposed man. I remember his medium length brown hair catching the wind, his pale shirt whipping up to expose his suntanned back. And then—in the backseat of my father’s truck, I couldn’t see much—there was a series of tracks embedded in the edge of the freeway jungle bed, and a faint puff of smoke.

One man gone in the blink of an eye before our own; a man at once becoming one with his maker. Was it an accident, or intentional? There was no way he could’ve survived. We considered pulling over, but two cars already had, meaning it only would have been to feed our morbid curiosities. We would have gotten in the way.

I am one of the last people to survey that man while he was alive. He went out in a terrifying blaze of glory. And all we could do was carry on. If the act was intentional, there will probably be no Wikipedia article detailing his reasoning; that was an act with barely any impact on the world other than his family, friends, and its witnesses. Did he view himself as a martyr? He was no suicide bomber, but was he fighting some war in his head that he could only win through complete self obliteration?

I’ve been taking the time to myself that summer has granted me to consider this archetype—one man against a world—in relation to my own life. So much has happened this summer. I feel like a more well built person; I feel more aware of how things work. I see better now what people are fighting for.

The lone motorcyclist from the other day sought glory, but he also sought closure. He sought transgression—transgression from the image of the makeuped body neatly displayed in an ornate casket in a dusty beige funeral home. He sought a death that was thrilling. He sought a death on his own terms.

If only more people sought to live life on their own terms as he found such in destruction.

The marching masses subject themselves to the name tags and identification badges, always updated as to not offend, that those in power dole out in scratch-and-sniff candy flavors. They take pride in being liberallibertariancentristcommunistsocialisttraditionalconservativemaggot like the little boy who got a rare card to trade on the playground. We take pride in consolidating our perspectives, our opinions, our idiosyncrasies into business cards sharp as razor blades to flash at all who pass and slash at those who got sorted into another pile. But we only leave surface level paper cuts. We do not cut deeper into the fertile dirt; we do not let our true colors flow like rivers of blood. Instead, we reinforce ourselves out of fear. We do not want a soul to see the problems in our individual biologies, the DNA-level mutations that don’t fit alongside our assigned prescriptions. We don’t just fight a war within our own heads—we fight a war against our heads.

We fight a war against deviation from the norms our chosen cultures have built up for us. We lash out at our hypocrite friends without considering the inherently flawed nature of humanity. We forget that human is the only label that truly means anything. We label, we observe, we scheme, we divide. We succumb to the allure of the fascist brain. But we never conquer.

We are trapped in an ever overloading warfare—“us” versus “them”. We let people in power make problems out of things that were never problems to begin with, and we allow ourselves to play along. We follow the rising tides, the rising prices, the rising temperatures. But we save the backlash for those that the powers that be tell us to fight—or some figurehead who cut a little too deep for our liking, who may retreat but will never truly exit the stage. But those cuts still are surface level. We attack the facade but never think to pull back the curtain to find the Wizard. We trade the truth for comfort and self doubt. We build ourselves up to the point where we think we have everything to lose, to keep safe and sanitized as some supposedly upstanding example of purity and sanctity. We forget that the people pulling the strings—and maybe one lone motorcyclist—already live as if they have nothing to lose.

But living like there is no tomorrow does not equate oblivion if your will is strong enough. The people we claim—and fail—to fight against know this. Their voices would not echo on, much to our dismay, if they did not know this. We just cannot hide behind excuse any longer. We must allow ourselves the strength to make impact in the name of what we truly believe in, no matter what anyone else thinks or tells us. We must allow ourselves to take control, and then we must allow ourselves to lose control. We must allow our true colors to bleed out down the highway; and the world will drink from that endless river; and then the world’s hands will finally show their true dirtiness, with every speck of soil and gushy worm entrails creating a disgusting, entrancing, beautiful portrait of what it means to be human.

At age nineteen, I want the truth. At age nineteen, I speak my truth. At age nineteen, I reject dilution and suppression. At age nineteen, I reject the fascist brain.