Neither Boy Nor Old Man, Be Wholly Myself

少年易老學難成 — youth fades fast, and learning is hard to complete.

There is more left to do than breaths I have left.
Among all I have failed to accomplish, I am far too blurred a shape.

Who would ever wish to become a defective thing?
Yet saying it's fine because everyone is simply "themselves"
is, in the end, irresponsible.

That is why I must heap up, across this universe,
the reason I was born.
Even noise will do.
To fill this universe solidly with that clamor —
that is the duty of my life.

Noise and clamor — this world might just be
one vast realm of noise leaking through the walls between floors.
The self I'll be then, as if arrived from the future,
or as if I knew nothing at all,
ready at any moment to __