Strange how a person can brighten your day
Someone you have never met and never will meet
Suddenly sweeping the gray away with a positive comment

Curious how a website can validate your feelings
Calling your insecurities to attention and dismissing them
Chucking them into the bin where they belong

Silly how something online
Can make you feel so special

I. The joy
Oh my god, the overflowing, the sheer exultation I feel when you are near, the way my heart feels full up with happiness that I am here with you. Sparkling waterfalls glistening in the morning light, reflecting and refracting the small prisms of light into a display of every color, meticulously exceeding the rainbow and all colors known to humanity.
II. The shock
The amazement that someone as rare and extraordinary could find someone as every day as me, and the honor I feel to have someone like you in my life. A vibrant tree frog, verdant and positively glowing like a jewel in a rainforest teeming with life, only to find a common toad as a companion.
III. The trust
Nervous about opening up, sharing interests that might bring us closer together, but might make you think me strange. An old burgundy door, paint peeling off to reveal a vibrant teal beneath, with ancient brass hinges, swinging back in forth according to the whim of the wind and creaking slowly.
IV. The relief
Thankfulness that you did choose me, that you chose someone. Grateful that it was me, excited about the fact that you reached out to me as I did to you. A beaming smile, eyes filled and overflowing with tears, slowly streaking down my face until I can taste the salt in my still-upturned and slightly open mouth.

The first time: A breath of steam, rising from a deep-toned, treacle brown liquid, turning darker by the minute as the leaves slowly steeped their essence into the scalding water, providing me energy enough to open my eyes... and look straight into the fogged glass, the first clear look of the world this day.

The second time: A tickle in my nose, rising in intensity, making my eyes scrunch in reflex. AAACHHOOOOO! I open my eyes, newly released from the lids that caged their sight, and see... fog.

The third time: A building frustration, a feeling of falling, trying to grasp all the responsibility given to me in less than an hour, and failing. Hopeless, I know, and useless as well, but I go though the day's events, each one compounding upon itself in my hindsight assisted by the salty water pooling in the corners of my eyes until I can't see anything at all... Oh wait. It's just the fog in my glasses.

Inky tentacles
Reach out of the book
Searching blindly
Until they find me.

My face hovering above the pages
Spell-bound by the lilting voice of a fictional character
And the world that I can never be a part of.

Harsh words melt
In the fictitious sun
And worries blow away
Thoughts on a wind in a different dimension.

They reach out,
Those strings of alliteration
The descriptions of beautiful places
The characters' internal struggles
Forming into tendrils of words and ink that stroke my face softly,
Then jab into my heart.

I am held captive till the very last page.

Mechanical pencil with heart of lead
From the darkness to you i fled
Fleeing for lack of hope
To keep me from putting my neck in the rope
Your grey lines mark and on hands streak
And sometimes make the paper squeak
But when I need to write things down
You run my thoughts right out of town
So I had a new idea caught
And carved into my skin as I thought
Mechanical pencil with heart of lead
Can you bring my soul back from the dead?
(My blood, my blood, is much too red)

Green buds peep out of the
Stone cold earth
Defiant
Rearing their heads to the sun, their leaves unfurl
Stretching from a long winter's nap
Longing to ascend to the brightest point in the sky
Or to be the next best thing
Colors develop, going from
Light verdigris to
Translucent periwinkle to
Show-stopping magenta
In a couple of days
Their petals
The most delicate of velvet
Like stroking a butterfly's wing
And as their beauty transforms the world from unforgiving
To something magical
I sneeze.