One Giant Leap

by Kay Simone

“There’s relief in that. I am no longer my accomplishments or my failures. I am no more important than any one molecule that makes me up — and my identity, my memories, my experiences, my shortfalls are a story that I invent on the fly every moment of my life — and they’re meaningful, but only in the context that I am a piece of… all that out there. There’s no home or not home, there’s no me or not me. There is every thing and I’m allowed to be a part of it.”

The acknowledgement that he had suffered — the words are simple. And they mean a lot.

Eventually everyone tended to see it — whether they were friends or boyfriends or coworkers. Patrick tries too hard for too long and people just... well, they get tired of having him around.

"I don't know how else you can explain the fact — the solid reality — that out of every century on earth, out of every epoch, with every different combination of atoms and cells and situations — out of the sheer chaos of the universe, you and I just happened to exist on the same planet at the same time," Patrick says. "If that's not luck, those are some pretty incredible odds we just beat. What's thirteen years compared to the whole history of the galaxy?"