No disclaimers, please.

I'm in the process of building my business. I want to take it from a one-man operation and turn it into a respectable establishment, i.e. I want to graduate from being a sole trader to running a serious legal entity that will stand on its own even when I'm gone.

My primary motivation is money. I want to make enough money to be able to do certain things. I want to be able to hire the best minds to work with, to access the best tools and to deliver the best solutions/products to my clients and customers.

I also want to sweep some rubbish from the house that I am, that I have built and I need an expensive broom.

One of the things I've learnt about doing business is that when you're perceived as a small fish, you'll spend an unfair amount of time fighting for everything from an honest job to a fair price,  a shred of dignity and your own fucking money. It's not fair, it's not just and equitable and demands of you, if you're going to get by in such a manner, slightly more than your fair share of ass licking.

I want to stop kissing some ass. No sir, not me, you can go 'eat it'.

*

You know what a contract is? It's a formal agreement between two or more parties outlining the various ways in which each party is going to fuck up the other and what they're all going to do about it after that. Human interaction is based on contracts, most of them unspoken but expressed in one form or another.

I made a deal with myself a long time ago that I would take all the happiness I could from this life and then some; I promised a younger me that we would be everything we wanted to be, that we would never be afraid to take the stage and dance, for ourselves, for the songstress, for life. It was a binding agreement, a life contract, a marriage of will and spirit.

I have found myself standing in front of him, that me of yesteryear, making excuses, issuing disclaimers when he tried to egg me on, to remind me of an ancient contract signed in undaunted will and shining spirit. I have felt shame, guilt and the impotence of inaction.

I shall feel them no more.

**

"Please don't fall in love with me."

"Why?"

"I don't think I can reciprocate."

I have said as much to someone else and in my thinking then, I was doing them a favour but of course I realise now that I was only afraid of being remotely responsible for another's happiness, however fleeting. I did not feel capable of giving as much and I can only imagine how many doors I left unopened in the chambers of my heart.

***

O ye of noble spirit, rising with the dawn, look upon the deeds of this man and find your brother.

****

If I say I shall, then I shall will the spirit and you will have all of me, nothing less.