[Chapter One]

“Change. That is what I long for, what my heart desires, what I ache for. I want to feel it running through my veins, electrifying, burning change. I want it to energise my life, energise me, give me new power to keep on moving forwards.
Some day, I want to be able to say I’ve made many choices in my life and granted, some of them wrong, but I don’t have a single regret about them. When I’m old and worn with age, I want to have a grandchild on my lap and tell them that I have truly lived and that the ride may have been hard at times, but that it was worth it.
Big words, coming from me. Great dreams, but empty. Thoughts so many of us have and with so many that is what they remain: hollow words that flash through the mind. Nothing really happens. It’s a frost flower on a window during the winter: when it’s there it’s beautiful, but then it fades slowly to come back sometime in the future. It keeps coming back and it keeps disappearing.
Every once in a while, somebody stands up and does it. That is rare, however.
I tend to find it ironic how so many people seem to want change, but if the opportunity is right in front of them, they run away. They cling onto their safe lives with their safe husbands and wives. They say ‘no thanks’ and close the door. They take no risks.
The one that actually seizes the opportunity is the courageous one. The one that lets change into his life is the brave one. They are rare, even more so than diamonds and real love.
What I do find immesely curious is that if one person stands up, so many follow and agree. It takes one person to move an entire people.
Don’t we all secretly want to be that person? That person that brings what we all crave for but deny ourselves? I know I want to. Because it concerns my very own life, my very own future. It determines whether I will have a grandchild to tell that I’ve got regrets or not, it determines whether those big words and great dreams will become reality or remain things I’ve written down just now.
It is not my ambition to go down in history as a great person, I do not care if my name will be a famous one years from now – or sooner, I couldn’t care less if my name will apear in history books or not. What I do want to achieve is to change the lives for the better of those people that are judged by a majority that thinks they are entitled to forbid a minority the right of every human being. What sense is there in letting a majority vote for something that concerns a smaller yet significant part of the population? What sense is there in voting for this at all? It should be self-evident. It cannot be that discrimination will be written into the constitution of the United States of America, the land of the free. I, and I am sure many with me, want equality to be written into the constitution. I want change.”