Its funny how the words can find you in the nosiest of moments, as drunk uni-students brush past you like the crisp winter air, with the lights of the city filling the shadows of your footsteps. Each step connects itself in solidarity to every other lonely walk, every twilight city stroll, reviving old memories and feelings lost to all but the mellowest parts of my being.

Goals are, for the most part, eternal. You're never finished with them. You never stop reaching for them. And in the darkness and solitude, your dreams, achievements, and goals lay themselves out across the streets and intersections of the city. Some of those streets you have already tread, illuminated by the moonlight, intimately familiar. Others are marked at the crossroads - their names foreign and the path bumpy - the ones which are yet to be faced at some undetermined time in the future. In this lonely journey, you are faced with crossroads every day, but turning down them remains the hardest choice of your life.

Each crossroad offers a unique challenge, and forms a new characteristic or skill, through which you can find and define yourself. The hobby and curiousity driven ones are the easiest, easily travelled with reading and thought, and you often take these in lieu of the harder paths that lay before you. You have to pick your battles.

But the night sky reveals all, and the roads ignored are as obvious as the nights in which they were discovered. Every time, the night fades a little with the realisation.

This is you, Tom. This is me, every broken self promise and dream and wish almost forgotten about and every time you moved on. Every girl you ever liked where they never knew it, every first-year night rampaging the city with friends, every time you knew what you needed to do to push yourself - just say something, just call someone - but in your mind you had already confined it to a thought almost as soon as it manifested. This is us.

And once in a while, just like every once in a while, something happens. A force from within, a drive, a mighty bulldozer smashes through the walls in your mind and frees you from the containment of self conditioning. You find the space within you to do what you always imagined yourself doing, without a hope for redemption or failure either way. The dark roads light up, the crossroads align. Through this grace, we find the means to break into a new district of our journey.

--twitchyliquid64