Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock.

So this is the end.

This conundrum, this series I have created has been swirling on the tip of my tongue for months, and I have devoted my heart to it. Time is running out on this singular year, and everything will change in a moment. For now I will cherish the moment I'm in.

Bagels and cream cheese and coffee shops will be my home, I will splendor in them for as long as I can. I just cannot believe everything is changing. I was well aware it would change, said that it will change, but now that I am on the precipice I just want to take three steps back and tell Grace not to jump.

The one who I never expected is now gone for summer, and it broke my heart a little. The others are almost gone as well, and that breaks my heart a little. I will be back in the realm of the white rabbit and, though I miss him, one white rabbit does not account for seven unexpecteds

Down the rabbit hole I go again, to find another new wonderland. Grace is always changing, evolving, and this time I must do it without the aid of my friends. I will survive, likely, its just the loneliness that scares me. After months of being loneless, I just am not quite sure how loneliness will fit on me.

Just promise yourself to not go back to the dormouse and the queen of hearts, Grace. Promise you won't stoop that low. They have bottled and broken you, and you deserve better. You have better. Don't let their honey words and fake apologies change who you are.

So now its over. But it will be renewed, the time will come again for Grace to be in this neck of wonderland.

And for now I will be a survivor. A survivor of old wonderland, in hopes of getting back to new wonderland. I can almost touch it, taste it. It is only months away.

Then, I will be home again.

Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock.

What is our obsession with love? Now, I'm not absurd, I am human, I understand we need love to feel exactly that. Yet we are obsessed with not all love. We simply obsess over the romantics.

As a person in love, you'd think I'd be the most sympathetic. But I have a different view entirely.

General love is what you need. Not always mushy, cute, romantic, sappy love. You need the love that supports, the love that hold you high on broken ledges and let you achieve your dreams and reach for the stars.

You don't need the big things to validate your love, and you don't need validation constantly. Trust in love, you trust in your family, and your friends, so why not trust in your other half as well?

It drives me crazy so much around pertains to romance. Its not the romance, the wooing, that matters. its the love. Pardon me, but **** all this romance *******. I don't need a thousand roses or a fancy necklace to prove someone loves me. I need a paper crane and a promise, the little signs that remind me of what matters.

Funny enough, a thousand years comes to my speakers. Ignoring its romantic aspects, being brave is important. The brave gestures are what matter.

No one needs a significant other. They just need love, and love does not always come in such romantic forms. As the Beatles wisely said, all you need is love.

And I try to live by that, in the best way I can.

Its like tasting the tip of a sugar cone with your ice cream, and like finding the *** of gold at the end of your rainbow. You are already pretty astounding by the first thing, but then its like, POW, and it hits you, that this is what happiness feel like.

Its like falling in love with a book, or a person, and realizing that they speaks to you in just the right way. That their heart shares beats with yours and now you cannot imagine a day without them.

Its like a mild summer day, or a steaming one, depending on if you're near water or shade or not. But I'm rambling.

Its crying when you're happy, is squeaking when you even think about something, simply dying at its mention.

Its like being born, and everything is new and shiny and amazing and tremendous and terrifying and perfect all at once. You scarcely dare to categorize everything, because everything simply is a wonder to you. You live in a wonderland.

Its the best of times, and the cheeriest of times, when out of darkness comes light and out of sickness comes life. Its beautiful. Its maddening. Its everything you ever dreamed it to be and more.

Today, I feel happiness, in its pure unbridled form, and I haven't felt so alive. This is what makes the pain worth it. This is what transcends the tears. This is what I live for.

Happiness.

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.

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 can't understand why my heart is so broken, rejecting your love...*

Every time I hear that line, it kills me inside because I cannot deny the obvious truth of it. I want to love you so badly, and I try to with all my being, but I always fall short of being good enough for you. I am not your perfect girl, I might not be your forever. And I want so desperately to be.

I cannot hide around you. Its a blessing and a curse, to always be myself around the person I love, but I curse for sometimes I'm so desperate to hide those uncovered emotions that I push you away. You deserve better than that, but I'm not sure I can be better.

My pills are running through my veins, begging me to be stable, yet here I am, weeping over my laptop wanting to be someone else, anyone else. Guess I can't run from the monsters inside my heart, the demons that course through my blood.

I can't promise forever. I can't even make that promise to myself. I want more than anything to be your forever, to be your soulmate. God knows I don't believe in those, but I want to, for you, and you only.

Is it disorder screaming or my fears or what that want me to doubt you, to hide from you, to run away. I've been running for years and each time I try to leave I come back. I don't want to reach a day that I don't, but I don't trust my own heart.

You deserve better. Its less of me being insecure and more of no one deserves this, not even me. Yet I am, and I don't wish it upon anyone else. It kills me that people care, but it would also **** me to be alone, so I cannot win. What do you do when everything you do leads to the end?

I love you. I can't change that, and I don't want to. But I don't know what to do. I'm not getting better, no matter how much you want me to. I will forever be a lost, broken, little girl. You're not perfect, but you're not this and I couldn't bear weighing you down forever.

But I'm too afraid to leave. I'm too afraid that I'll never find something like this again. I'm reaching twilight and I'm afraid without you I may get lost in blackness. That  this is my last chance of falling in love before I give up on it entirely.

I'll try not to run, and I'll try not to leave, but know no matter what I do I love you. I might even love you always.

For you only.

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.