My fingers skim the edge of tattered paper gingerly, as if brushing a deck of playing cards, gambling my life away to dealers across this silver-studded Eastern Seaboard.

My notebook shakes on my meaty legs, bouncing to and fro, afraid of its future, the words that might be permanently tattooed on its ivory fibers. Perhaps a treble clef will emerge from stolen pencils, maybe a confession, a letter, a tangle of thoughts like these.

I have shipped my heart off to the enormity of the world, to other continents, to other lives, to a few hundred miles north of my sweetly sullen disposition.

Infinities must taper eventually - please, God, let it be so. This world is indescribably huge, and it swallows me in the chasm of its histories day by day. Let the world close in a little bit, let my infinity truncate within the realms of this paper earth.

Oh, this paper earth, to whom I have given sixteen years. I have learned its languages and sung its music. I have traced its melancholy roots deep into the crevices of my fingers and I have found solace in the hollows of my tired eyes, these sockets modeled after the orbit of the bleeding sun.

But still I stare ahead at one blank sheet, a fragment of earth cut into rectangle after rectangle. I have the capacity to imagine its future, along with my own and the futures of others. Other beings, who ignore the wonders of simple smoke just to enjoy a short-lived high, a high tinged with regret and solitude.

Oh, how enormous it all seems, yet this quiet sector in my head feels contained in its own set of limited perceptions. I long for my rope to be lengthened just so I may follow my world to its destinations, but I do not know what variables lay on the other end of this frayed leash. Danger is inevitable, but wanderlust is the stronger of the instincts.

So I touch my leather notebook dangerously, quietly, thoughtfully. For who so bold to write their musings of the earth on a simple sheet; for who so brave to break their bodies for the pleasure of others; how do I ignore the seduction of adventure? My endless infinity fluctuates, yet still I choose to write.