Every single time you meet a new group of friends, you always think to yourself "This is it. These are my people. These will be the people I die with." You imagine what it'll be like when you all start having kids. When you all start sagging and losing your minds. You laugh at the thought of chasing each other in wheelbarrows (yes, wheelbarrows) at 75 years old.

Then one day, you start to drift. You start having different priorities and realizing that you're all moving in very different directions. I always say that the saddest part of growing up is realizing that some people won't and that the saddest part of moving forward is everything you leave behind. And many a time, you will leave people behind. I've only one stable friend since I was 5, kind of — we weren't really friends until high school despite always being in the same group of friends. And this person, my best friend is someone I know I'll always have next to her soul brother. Because we always take a little time to make room for each other, no matter how busy our schedules are. I ask her if she wants to have lunch after finals and he'll check me during down time in the barracks.

I love you (all of you), my bears. I do. And I don't love you any less, because despite everything I can't feel any sort of disconnection between us. I don't want to let you guys go but at the same time I don't know how long I'll continue to hold on. And it's not even that anyone's really trying to hang out, but I feel like going to you right now will leave me unhappy. It isn't you, it's me. I'm still working some things out with myself.

But then there's them. An attractive bunch. Super stars. Jack of all trades. These people can do just about everything and I'm just kind of here, hanging onto their coat tails waiting for them to get either bored of me or just lose patience. Maybe it's my thirst to learn more or my selfish gain to make something of myself, but I find myself chasing after them once or twice at a time. It's rather reassuring when they chase me back.

The difference between you and them is that if I die with them I know why. It isn't because they are better or more efficient or prettier than you. It isn't because they are the cool kids and I want so badly to bedazzle my jeans too.

Tonight, myself and one of them laid under the sky and stared at the stars. This isn't unusual. If you're close to me, you've done this with me before. I've done this with y'all. Conversations aren't necessarily different, there's always some bit of deep topic as long as you've got the right people by your side. But with you, the conversation would more than likely be about superheroes or videogames or something stupid on Youtube.

Do you know why I like to stare at the stars? Do you know why I started staring at the stars when I was in high school? Because it helped me to write. Some of the best lines come from starry-skied-and-eyed nights, either alone or with myself.

You know you've found the right people when you look at the same stars and see the same things.

The difference between you and them is that we don't see the same things; hell, we don't see the same stars. I have seen more shooting stars with them than I have with you. Not that it's any reason to judge.

While we laid under the stars, she envisioned how she would paint the sky and probably hearing some kind of suitable sound track to go with it while I imagined Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Starry Night" (in Dr. Who episode form) and pondered the kind of story I could write.

We are artists. We are set on loving the world. We are set on changing the world. We are set on the world. We don't look at the world and see us, we look at the world and see everything but. We are focused on the bigger picture, the future, what could be. Sometimes, we have a hard time keeping our feet on the ground but we have enough sense to not let it get out of hand.

We don't get odd jobs to get us by for the next month. We don't do things to entertain ourselves for the moment. We expend all our resources, our energy and ourselves specifically because we want to give everything we do our very best. Because we will only do what we believe deserves our very best.

Albeit, we currently do have odd jobs because we're getting really broke....because, well, we're artists. The starving kind. And two of us are in school.

The difference between you and them is that they are me.

I need them and I only hope to God that they could ever need me as much.

So if and when I drift away from you like a piece of wood in the ocean, this is the reason why I'm still with them. And perhaps I am defending whatever action I plan to take in the hopes that you don't talk shit. But perhaps, this is because I also know that they would never if I left them. In fact, I think a part of them is waiting for me to take off.

But I don't plan on going much elsewhere unless I have them with me. I am only as good as my team. And I refuse to do it without them. So unless the band breaks up due to "creative differences" I'm sticking around.

We're just a bunch of Dreamers. Thinkers. Innovators. Doers. Crazy people with large appetites. But we'll stop at nothing to create our reality.

So when you see the khameleon kahulo', you best recognize.

Because we're doing this for you.

Z.