Tick, tock, tick, tock.

The voices are ringing in my ears, a thundering conundrum I have yet to figure out. He's screaming, no he's whispering, oh I can't tell anymore, from a thunder to a shiver its all the same to me I'm deaf I'm blind I see with echolocation I am a bat in its cave begging to see the light though I know it burns.

Each sentence blurs to the next a word a whisper oh there I go with whispers again did I forget a comma, some punctuation? Sorry my mind is a mile a minute when it feels such frustration in its bones that it cannot feel its toes anymore.

Wait, my brain doesn't have toes.

Nonsense. I am practically a wonderland character with all my nonsensical drivels about love and mania and speed and tears and lust and death. Give me a hat and I'm practically batty, my good sir. I will make a march with my hair and wish you a very merry un-death-day, or however that goes.

Falling down my rabbit hole, no my cave, I'm a bat, remember? I have found a way to fall sideways right into your heavy arms and you stare at me aghast, for I am not who you once thought I to be. There is a face for each hue, each color of my pigments, I'm a leaf, each season brings out a different color, well unless your coniferous but that is besides the point and very much more about needles, but I digress.

Wait, I'm a bat. What is this nonsense about leaves?

Sit down at my table and I will explain it all to you dear, how my brain is wired like a ticking time bomb, ready to set off at any moment, particularly if my pretty little pills aren't butterflying in my bloodstream, those little friends of mine simply forgetting a swim day.

Funny how one day without them can be average or it can be, well, this. Quite mad, isn't it? Tick tock, tick tock. The mouse ran up the clock, the clock struck twelve and the bat swept down and the mouse is left to rot. Tick tock, tick tock.  

Give me a cat or two and then there's a name for me, but I bet your bottom dollar every single one is a chesire, grinning, tormenting, taunting, killing. They reflect the little demons in my heart.

Have you ever been so afraid of your own reflection, or the butter knife at the end of your table, and how it might just slip into your fingers at ever the wrong moment and you might regret your next action for the rest of your life? I've only once or twice, but it was a once too many, and now I'm terrified of that little butter knife resting on the end of my table, taunting my demons, knowing how much I fear them.

Should I be a true ****** and enter a hospital? No, I will never learn honesty, all these thoughts kept up in my pretty little head will never leave my pretty little head, they enjoy their tenancy too much. Just pop the pills, Grace, darling, and everything will be ok.

A few more hours, and then I can be reunited with my dear little friends, and like the good little bat I am, recoil back into my cave, and let the butterfly angler I wiggle out be the beautiful front everyone sees. No mad hatter, no march hare, no alice, not even a bat. A pretty butterfly that everyone loves.

If only they knew what this butterfly had behind her; a cave full of wonderland.

And everyone should be afraid of that.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

Its a heavy feeling, on your heart, when you realize your manic ravings have some harsh truth to them.

I am dangerous.

The pills help for now, holding my insanity deep within, but what when I grow tolerant? What when they stop working? What when i forget, like today?

I could hurt people. Break them, tear them, maim them, **** them. Maybe **** me. Its devastating and terrifying to realize the monster under your bed is none other than the reflection in the mirror.

You were once a little girl, Grace, full of dreams and hopes and promises of forever and rainbows and smiles and happiness. But then experience and biology kicked in and you became... this.

You would be so scared of this, little Grace, so scared of the hallucinations and the voices and mood swings and the hatred and the sadness and the anger. You are using so many ands and you would hate yourself for it, you do hate yourself for it, but you have bigger fears at the moment.

You're going to hut every person you love. You'll try not to, little Grace, but you're going to. Every day you forget, you get closer to becoming the monster you know you are in your heart. The one who doesn't know right from wrong and is hyper and screams. The one who is killing herself slowly from the inside out without even trying.

You hate her, Grace, the girl you grow up to be. Parts you love, the sane parts that love so deeply it hurts and cares so much for others, but the parts that could **** everyone? You hate that.

God help me I'm coming undone.

My wonderland is terrifying. I'm terrified of it, of me, and you will be too, Grace. Never forget who you were.

Its the only possible way you may be able to survive this, to survive wonderland.

Its our only hope, you and me, and we have to take it or everything we love?

It'll die.

My little blue dress hangs in my closet now, and my black ribbon is around my wrist and not my hair. I've cut my long blonde hair shorter, and my childhood fantasies are a mere haunting that reach to me at night, reminding me of who I am.

I once dreamt of you as a wonderland, a place of fear and magic and horror that I would suffer a thousand lives to feel a moment of.

Then I grew older, and recognized that this wasn't a wonderland; or perhaps, it was, but not quite the wonderland I was thinking of. This wonderland had a name, a name that came with frightening connotations.

Bipolar.

Those fantastical moments in which I was flying, in which nothing but the flowers could sing with me as I danced in a purple field of wonder. Where the bluebells kissed my hands and the crochet was with hedgehogs and the pond behind my house was much more than it seemed.

Bipolar.

Each corner I turned in which a shadow hid behind, shadows I could only see and that chased me through the darkness unto the stairs and into my bed, holding me tight and strangling me until I woke up and realized everything was ok.

Bipolar.

Each friend I made as a child at night that wasn't tangible, though we shook hands and danced and read books together as if we were real. As if anything was real.

Bipolar.

It was a game I was playing that I didn't know was hardwired into my brain, that this wasn't just Grace and her wonderland, it was something darker, deeper. But alas, that's how it is as you age, isn't it?


Wonderland gets darker with each visit, and with each day it grows closer to me. Its terrifying how it may begin to affect others, others i love, but there's not much I can do, is there?

My one wish is that there will not be another blonde little girl, with my green eyes and my blue dress, finding herself stumbling into a wonderland that she cannot handle.

If it means I can never have the one thing I want more than anything, then I am willing to sacrifice everything to protect that little girl.

I will never lead another little girl into wonderland.

Never.

Ring, ring, ring, ring.

Water's running down my face, no, tears, their salt is melting into my very bones as I stare at the phone and listen to it, ring, ring, ring...

My caterpillar has finally turned into the beautiful butterfly I believed I dreamed of, only to find myself rejecting him now at every turn. His Grace has grown up, and realized his riddles and rudeness are not the love I deserve, not the one I want, not anymore.

Wonderland has changed, too. It has expounded upon itself, growing larger with newer faces, faces I'm growing to love and cherish more than old.

In the whispering hours of Wonderland, a New Frabjous Face takes my hand and tell me to run with him, and I do. We run and dance and even when the rain is pouring he is still holding my hands and my face and telling me to run and breathe and live so beautifully.

My caterpillar never held my hand in the rain, he always disappeared into the clouds with his booming voice, judging and screaming about his own struggles while I was drowning in mine. Wonderland tends to flood.

Forecast for now though is sunlight with a slight overcast of whimsy.

After the New Frabjous Face, I feel more comfortable in the rain. Maybe it is apart of me, especially since I always beg to go dancing in the rain. Maybe I knew all along the rain was the key to Wonderland.

Caterpillar would be glad to hear I've been forgetting my magical little pills, no safety is swirling through my veins. He always judged me for using them, though he insisted it was my choice. My choice that he disapproved of.

New Frabjous Face and other new friends are new to me, but they makes me feel alive again, like maybe Wonderland can be a happy place again, like maybe the Jabberwocky can learn its place once more.

Ring, ring, ring...

And as the night goes on, I turn away the phone and let it ring, for it doesn't own my heart anymore.

I do.

Five. Cinco.

Half of the ten and a fifth of the twenty five. Mathematics are a funny subject, don't you think? Some man just made up letters to correlate with numbers to transcend to concepts that in all reality could mean nothing and the square root of a orangutan could actually be yellow.

I contemplate on that a lot, being the Grace that I am, wondering if what's real is real, if words are just words, or all they the pygmy hippopotamuses flying in my dreams. Anything is possible. Dreams could be reality, and reality could be a dream. Or maybe there is no such thing as realness, and everything is just madness.

I learned a lot from my friend the Mad Hatter, how to love, how to be disappointed, how to fall into a pit of despair and how to wear a hat like a ****** deviant and love it.

But the most important thing I learned is that sanity is very subjective, because what may seem totally sane to me, completely within the norm, may seem like complex incongruity to someone else. Maybe we're all mad. Maybe no one's mad. Maybe its just you, maybe its not you.

Special. That's another word that always got me, but I prefer to think in the realms that everyone is different. The world is in different shades and hues, none are ever quite the same, so why should people be that way?

But maybe yet again I'm only speaking in riddles and soliloquies and monologues and standing over all my conquests I am screaming my thoughts while they utter not a word, fearful of manic me.

I'd be afraid of manic me. She is quite the finger-twitching tyrant.

Words are words but are they real? Are they what you mean or are they just lies, lies, words that you scream until she dies, dies, and the world is at peace.

Oh, that's not right.

I once wrote a short poem similar to that I could recite by heart, but as my heart has changed the words become jumbled. Death creeps its way into lies, and heavy juxtaposition ***** with my meanings. Eating my words, until I am not a girl anymore, I am a leaf, or a bat, stuck in Wonderland until the end of my days.

Funny how Alice the savior became Alice the bat.

Wait, I'm not Alice, I'm Grace.

Oh, I do not know who I am anymore. And that is the tragic beauty of Wonderland. You just never know what, or who, tomorrow may bring.

Its not love.

Now don't think I'm crazy. I swear I'm not, at least not mostly. But its true, its not love, it can't be yet, its been one night and I'd be a true psychotic if I thought it was.

Once I thought one night was love, but I was also high off the fumes of my own cruelty and didn't know left from right and Up from Toy Story.

But it matters.

Not in the way you think, God, I swear not like that. I am not mentally able to catch feelings right now as I stumble through the vacant halls of my own sanity, or better put, the filled asylum of my own insanity.

Still, though.

It was a night I could be me, a night I want to feel again, where I'm bare and broken and real and **** and that doesn't happen very often for me. My mask of smiles and lies tend to hide everything, but not that night, and not with you.

Here in this new sect of Wonderland I can be me , be Grace, with little to no question. Well, there's been some rejection and tears and pain and all the average Wonderland shenanigans, but its been magical. I feel like Wonderland is a place I can live in again.

In old Wonderland, I was beginning to suffocate, to feel the cold hand of stability take over me. But I am not ready for that, I'm ready for freedom and dancing in the rain and having *** until the moon goes to bed.

I wasn't ready to be in love with the Caterpillar. Crazy, considering I always thought it was he who was unprepared, but all along it was me.

Guess I can't live my life wondering what's just around the river bend, I have to investigate. I have to know. Things must get curiouser and curiouser, its how it goes.

Let my youth wash over me, let my childlike Wonderland wash over my eyes and let me be me for awhile. Its not normal for me to be this malleable. Everything used to be lies, but now everything is freedom, and for now I love it.

Thank you for that night. Its a beginning, a new one, for Wonderland and I. Why?

Because for the first time in forever, Grace of Wonderland is free.

Lucky.

Some people would look at this little life of Grace and think, ****, she is lucky. Of course, you know better, don't you, Wonderland? You know what goes on in my hodge-podge head where the rainbows lament and the killers dance.

So come and tell me what my kiss tastes like. I want to know if the poison is evident or I'm just the one who can feel it.

Skeletons twirl on my walls, and that's not a metaphor. I literally have neon skeletons dancing on my walls. That's just the type of person I am.

No where. That's where we're going right now, with wonderful gibberings of a lost cockatoo, so lost she found herself in a young woman's body.

Lost little Grace, trying to find her place in the world, just like her beloved Alice. Yet Alice was always free of Wonderland at the end of the night. Or was she? She did always gravitate towards the insane place, maybe she's just as trapped as Grace.

Musings of the world as I grow, from young little wide-eyed girl to the woman I am today. A young woman, albeit, a naive, wide-eyed woman with too much hope in her heart, but a woman nonetheless.

The scars of your love leave me breathless. Oh no, no they don't. I hope mine have left you dead.

Still bitter I am how my caterpillar betrayed me. Have I not told this story? How in the dark of the night he found solace in the wings of another, to leave me blind to his deception. Thank the gods the March Hare had the sense to enlighten me.

Now I spend my nights in the arms of other, and I could not be happier. Never one solid man, never one stationary enough to become a character of Wonderland. But there enough so the loneliness does not creep up on me in the waking hours of the moon.

Stars are my companions now, yes, that's what they are. I am always stargazing and sometimes, when I'm lucky, I share my pantomimed sleep with them, pantomimed for of course I do not sleep.

So perhaps I am lucky, for I am a Grace surrounded by stars, and at the moment, I would not have it any other way.

I haven't been here in awhile. This section of Wonderland is almost foreign to me, after all this time. I have teetered upon its edge for ages, but now I have finally fallen in, down the rabbit hole, and I do not know when I will be able to get out.

The dark parts of Wonderland,  where the Jabberwocky roams free, have terrify me and always will. The simple thought of that monster lurking in my head brings a slew of tears to my face, a torrential downpour of my own misery. I do not trust the Jabberwocky, for it brings ideas, hallow, dark ideas to the front of my brain and causes me to wander in the frozen desert or extract my blood from my own skin, and I do not know myself anymore.

Each word is shaky, I cannot feel it on the tip of my tongue, I am numb. No one here in New Wonderland understands the Jabberwocky; hell, only the White Rabbit and the Dormouse really understood it in Old Wonderland, and my heart still broke relentlessly, like tides on a beach.

Those not from Old have rejected the Jabberwocky side of me, and that terrifies me. What if everyone here fears the Jabberwocky? I understand that fear; no one expects sweet, innocent Grace to also be the monster screaming under their bed, but I need people. I need people who know and understand and accept that tough I can be broken and horrific and abhorrent and repulsive that Grace is still there underneath it all and she needs love. She needs it more than she'll ever admit.

Words. I have lost them. I haven't the faintest clue what's left to say, for the Jabberwocky is ruthless and hateful of my words, and I'm lucky to have gotten this far. In my dreams I am whole, in my imagination the Jabberwocky was gone, but I know now it has not left me.

It never will.

So here we go again, tumbling down a rabbit hole, insistent on trying to find something curiouser and curiouser.

Life is an adventure, and fortunately, or not so much, mine is a constant trip to Wonderland, through the Jabberwocky's lair and the Queen of Hearts' castle and the winding paths to the mad tea party, my favorite place to go. We're all mad here, and I revel in  it.

When I started this journey through Wonderland, I was certain it would be a place I hated, ahbored, feared, vilified. The wonder ****** me in, but once I was aware of my surrounding I didn't like so much anymore.

But now Wonderland is home, where my heart sets its beats and my brain rests its heavy head, where I sing goodnight moon to the stars and sleep in the soft glow of their shine. I love it. I love me. There is no one that this Grace would rather be.

I compare myself to Alice, but I feel more like a sister now, one going through her experiences but feeling differently than she ever would. True, we're both polite and curious and blonde and sweet, but her eyes shine blue while mine glow green, showing her sadness and my envy, causing a utter travesty to Wonderland between the two of us.

I was the girl who turned into the Jabberwocky, and it makes much more sense for her to defeat me. To lead me out of the darkness and into the light, making me remember who I was and who I want to be.

Anyway, Alice is a visitor of Wonderland. Grace lives here, knows nothing but here. She may traverse the human world every once in awhile, but Wonderland is where she has grown, where she will always belong.

For once I see Alice as my friends, my family, those I love. They curiously visit my Wonderland, they see its sights and its horrors, and they only come to visit when there is a great party or a great fear. They do not live here. Only I, only Grace, live here.

Maybe I should be less afraid of bringing another young girl into this Wonderland, for who better to help traverse it than the one who owns it? And if the daughter I bring only is a visitor too, that;s just as fine. As long as the love we have for each other is a shining beacon that lights up Wonderland even in its darkest hours. For her, Wonderland will try its best to be what it was made to be; Wonderful.

And to thank all those who have helped, those who have changed and been curious enough to enter my land so different from their own, I have but one name for the daughter, given I have her.

I'll name her Alice.

Its been a journey, Wonderland.

We have made it through this transitional time in which my tears lingered in my tear ducts, tentatively prepared for a turbulent tragedy. Often I did cry. For a long time I cried. But I don't cry as much anymore. I smile more, laugh more, love more. And I would have it no other way.

All my old Wonderland characters are gone. I have truly changed scenery,  gone to a place I have never known before, where my old friends can rarely follow. Except the white rabbit, of course, but I always knew, behind the fears, that I'd never lose him.

Now I am with my new friends, stronger friends, older friends, all led in a march by the one I never expected, who holds my heart more than any person ever has before.

I am content, Wonderland. I am content with you, with my life, even very content with this simple room I now sit in, typing away. Its all very pleasant. Imperfect, but pleasant.

For the first time in a long time, I believe I have found my place. I have found home, as I expressed awhile ago, I have found a place to be bare and true and me with my words and my letters and my nonsensicals.

This life is a Wonderland, and I live every day in affectionate wonder.

The fire's burning and down, down we go, ashes, ashes, we all fall down. But its a fire I started. Its a fire I like. And not a bad fire, either. Fire always gets the worst reputation, of death, of violence, of an unhappy ending. My fire, though, its a figure entirely different.

Its passion, love, renewal. After all, nothing can grow until the old is gone.

A forest fire has been set upon Wonderland. Grace is anew, Grace is young again, Grace is beautiful. Not particularly in the traditional sense, but in her own sense, in her own light. There is love in her eyes, and its strange, because for once its not only for others.

The fire has swallowed up the Jabberwocky and the Queen of Hearts and all those demons that used to plague Grace, the demons of her past. The past does not define you. I once whispered tick, tock, and how the mouse went dead, but the mouse is not dead, simply grown unto a bird, flying and free.

Grace is still imperfect, her heart is not free of darkness, But she is growing and evolving as human beings do. Funny, its been a long time since she saw her body as a human one. Guess things change with time in Wonderland.

Maybe that's why the White Rabbit always is worried about time. Its a fickle, strange thing,s that runs then stops then screams and never dies, no matter how much you wish it to. Kind of like the Queen, but yet again the fire killed her so who knows what can happen in Wonderland.

Once again Wonderland is Wonderland, at peace and right and dark but always whimsical, always smiling, always Cheshire, even when it wants to frown.

Things are as they should be, with those I love beside me. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound. At last she sees.

I forgot to take my medicine.

Don't freak out, but I forgot to take my pills.

My veins are not swirling and dancing and wait actually the pills probably slow them to stop swirling and dancing so I guess now is the time for said swirling and dancing, is it not?

I can feel a bit of mania in my head, so excited and so alive and so real. I can tell because there goes periods, out the window, never to be remembered or recollected or what was I talking about?

Its twitching and hopping and like Wonderland and here we go, no ashes, just painting the roses red, painting the roses red, here comes the queen of hearts and off there goes my head, we're painting the roses red, until we end up dead.

Am I somberly manic, or maniacally somber or am i even sad? I don't know its just the twitch, I can feel it, so Chesire under my skin, the smile is coming through and my head is racing and my focus is wasting away under the hot spotlight of my own personal theater. Bravo, Grace, take a bow!

Letters and figures and math and language, so different but so funny because people speak both, why do mathematicians not count as fluent in another language, because its certainly foreign to me.

Ooh, I probably should alert the one I never expected, tell him how my head's a twitching and my fingers a fluttering and all of it a maddening. I missed this, I'd hate to admit, with the progress and the productivity and the beauty and the wonder and the land and the magic carpet ride. What land am I in again?

How funny it would be to see an intoxicated me. Am I intoxicated now? I don't know, I act like it but nothing's in my veins to even the pills am I born intoxicated, am I intoxication incarnate, am I addictive, am I a problem?

I like my sweater today, its got words that I love and words that I feel, to be or not to be, that is the question, **** it feels like I'm on fire, my limbs are burning and I am flame reborn. Maybe I should take off my hat and let out some heat, but its a pretty hat and it might feel bad if I ignore it.

Time to go back to busy life, where the life is dull and i am the fire but I love the dullness and the normativity because it involves my wonderland friends and the one I never expected. They make me happy, which lets me fly like this. The flying fire is me.

I took my meds today.

No one should get mad, but I'm still on fire. My limbs are mobile and vibrant and alive, and I want my fingers to pound and scream but I'm in a quiet room and that would be disastrous.

I cannot focus, my mind is only on the words, the little dancers in my head, the heroes in my horror story. If only typing was silent, I would flutter my fingers across the keyboard, making a frenzy of frightfulness that create my creative heart.

Shaky shivers spread on my shoulders, like too much butter on too little bread, the twitches are real, the quaking is real, disrupting my system and destructing my thoughts.

I want to write. These distracting classes with their loud voices and their incessant questions, I just want to sit back, type away, and write. I want to be happy, but I'm stubborn and manic and me. I'm happy doing what I want to do, and in the zooming car chase between the semi truck that is life and the little Prius that is me, the semi-truck is winning by magnificence.

Blue ring around my finger, beckoning me to do its will, do what it wants, be the me I want to be and forego all the consequences.

I'm tired and alert and a dying sun in a body made of stars, and I wish only to be a moon, changing and waning and growing and loving, just something different. That would be nice.

Guess pills or no pills, I will feel what I feel. Manic, depressive, level, whatever, its all muddled in the puddle that is my brain.

Time to fly and forget it all.