By Whom it May Concern

By: Eric Fulmer

As I looked inside myself, a story began to emerge. It was not in itself a story, per say, but through this vision, like a parchment being unraveled, a story unfurled itself to me. A tale about a quest for freedom...

A young man, who looked to be in his early twenties, sat on his couch late one night bored from the technology and instruction of his day. He thought to himself, "I feel trapped in the day to day scheduling and rushing that is my life. Is there no freedom?!" His conscious self knew the schooling that kept him bound to his studies was imperative and that one day he would need to call his learning to use, but there lay in him a deeper more adventurous side that longed for the freedom and adventure that the wilderness offered.

Once again, however, his studious conscious self wrestled his dreams back to the recesses of his mind as he stood and walked grudgingly to his room. On his desk, his computer and its billions of connections to the outside world lay awaiting him, but tonight, he ignored it. His attention was instead drawn to the old notebook he had used for one of his classes and then thrown aside and forgotten. He picked it up and flipped aimlessly through its pages. As the many empty pages that lay toward the end of the notebook flipped by, his mind became flustered. His dreams of freedom sprang to the forefront of his mind as he withdrew from his desk a simple yet powerful tool. He knew that this wooden cylinder and the graphite bound at its heart he could build a world all his own, and so, he began to write:

"As I looked inside myself, a story began to emerge..."