My wish is to vanish. Simply vanish. Vanish from this world, like I never existed in the first place.

Have you ever had such a wish?

A wish that you could disappear off the face of life as if a jumbo-sized eraser had rubbed you out.

Life, as dull as blank paper, as impossible as pigs that fly.

What's the point.

I wanted to be a star, a bright shining star in the night sky.

I wanted everyone to notice me and to be proud of me.

But try. Try you might and try twice...but for what?

An intangible treasure? Always, JUST beyond the extent of reach but that which pushes, and prods and motivates, and is perpetually existent in our very core, tugging at the threads that bridge the gap between mind and soul.

Pushes us forward. But where is forward, one might question?

For the lucky few, forward leads to the spotlight of a red carpet, a polished executive office, a penthouse suite in New York City; to the kingdom they forever desired, lusted and sought.

Yet, many are not so fortunate, pushed forward, THRUST off the edge of a steep jagged cliff to fall like dead weight, like ticking time-bombs, into the uncertainty and immeasurable darkness of destiny.

Some part of us grasps onto that final hope. A prayer. TO be saved, reprieved, caught by a nameless angel, our saviour to fly us to the refuge from which we plummeted, in the faith and belief that we recommence the journey to greatness or else choose another path, one of less ambition and wrought with mediocrity.

But for most, this angel never comes. And forced we are to fall, plummet, dive into the blackness into a bleak unknown, forever waiting the reprieve of death, anticipating the moment when we will simply cease to exist, and simply vanish.

I wrote this sonnet for my Grade 10 Drama class; it was about something that is really close to my heart; the idea that, many of us, as as youth, are told constantly by the people around us, our family, friends, teachers, that we are full of potential and that when we grow up, we will go on to do amazing things in the world, make heaps of money and ultimately, be GREAT.

When I was young, I grew up with this idea that I was special and that I would be GREAT. For years, I lost the idea that to be great, you need to work beyond hard and I fell trap to a life of pleasure and materialism. Around two years ago, as I entered a competitive high school program, I began to realize that there are literally hundreds of other kids equal to if not far better than I am, people with ten times the potential to be GREAT. Now I find I am struggling to catch up with these people, struggling to recapture those years that I lost.

I am literally running, but with each mile, I become more and more out of breath. My heart, my mind fail me, and this race, this race towards greatness, towards success, with every failing breath, becomes a race of growing difficulty, one that, at this moment, seems impossible to win. So now, I am eaten up by this desire to give in, to give up, to quit because I'm tired of failing, of not being the best at SOMETHING. I'm tired of being mediocre, simply average, of blending in. I want to stand out. I want to be unique. I want to be GREAT. But I won't be. How can I? I've lost the key to greatness and all I'm left with is this emptiness. A shell of my former self. Who am I?