My sophomore year at high school is one of my most apotheosized life phases in my memory. After the dark and violent 9th grade, this year entered on a mellow, somber note, in which my first heavily pedantic phase began. In this year, I took sociology while I studied psychology on my own, and burnt myself out on it before long. My closest friend, whom I'd been cut off from over the summer, came back into my life with a vengeance, exposing me to many artistic and emotional elements that sent me reeling. Those two forces took hold of me, and I found myself not only wrestling between them, but with the fact that I'd reached that inevitable point in life when I began trying to actively decide how to live my life. Concept of self, dissatisfaction with it, with overdone self-modification efforts, and agonizing over every fault in myself. My emotions exploded this year as well, and there were few times that I wasn't running in emotional overdrive, whether it be joy, anger, or sadness. My heart woke up this year, and loneliness consumed me.

Besides this being the year in which I finally began my journal, it is also the year in which I saw End of Evangelion, which was a bit of a turning point in my life. After all I was going through, that movie was like the climax, and my methods and feelings towards many things changed after I passed that hurdle, and though it might have been a revolution, it was still far from a catharsis. But, it was under all this self-perpetuated duress that I turned down the road that determined who I would be from then on. My mind and heart both rose to a new plateau. This was my golden year. The title of this life phase is a poem I wrote the year before, the first love poem I ever wrote, written only to show that I did have that side to me. That side of me consumed my soul with its laments over unrequited love.