BOYS LIKE me are stretched between infinity and end. Our days feel prolonged in their shortness, and with that, time smothers our lungs until there's no rests between our breaths. It makes us unable to unwind; our heartbeats hastened by our bodies' need to survive, to let the scarce oxygen flow through our narrow veins, to keep up with the restlessness of life.

Boys like me are filled with uncertainty. As if destiny procrastinated on our future and therefore left our clocks repeating the same tick over and over again, back and forth, still beating but not moving.

We feel as if we're at a standstill, while the dread hacks off a part of our mind to drop the burden of day to keep moving forward. It functions like a diver carries rocks to sink to his destination but was forced to release them to prevent hypoxemia. But boys like me are no divers, for the rocks are our mind and we don't know how much of it is left when we reach the surface. And if we do breathe, we know we failed to obtain our heart's desire, for we can no longer dive again in fear of losing the last bit we have left of us.

The choices [like heavy cold rocks] we had yet to make, we leave behind because as time moves on we fall behind and become isolated from our environment. We choke, we struggle, we sprint to catch up to what others made of reality while we were stuck trying to decide. And by doing so, we have unwillingly made our decision; we wasted too much time pondering. Never are we happy with the outcome, for we are unable to take responsibility for it as we tell ourselves that it was out of bleeding hands.

Boys like me are filled regret. It builds up within us, poisons us with alcohol until we are no longer conscious of it. And the day after, we regret the previous desire to forget. A behaviour that when you look at it seems like vicious circle, but we know that from below it is a spiral with no end. It's infinite like time itself. Ironic isn't it? Time is regret. It fades in the darkness that is within ourselves, it's in the core of our cells. Regret is our DNA, and we feel sorry for ourselves that we're aware of it.

Boys like me were never meant to be stretched, we were only meant to end.