Its the modern day cliche for a teenage kid to say some form of music saved them. Its a messy statement, putting a lot of pressure onto something other than yourself, giving yourself the unhealthy idea that you must find salvation somewhere that's not you. Truth is, those outside sources only make you realize the strong desires in yourself to get better, and they spark the fire that chases you out of hell. Cheesy as it is, its still you though. You made the effort to get better, you saved yourself. That outside source just helped.

Which is why its so utterly ironic that when I was a young high school student, I was convinced music had saved me. Repeat on repeat I listened to certain lyrics, trying to enlighten myself to make a change. That repetition is half the reason I don't believe its the music itself that saved me. If it was the music, the first time I heard it should have changed everything. The meaning of the song never changed, I was the one who changed. I made it better. It took time, and a lot of pain and stress, but I came out of it.

So as I fall back into the depressed patterns, I find it oddly comforting to go back to repeat and play those same words over and over again until something gives. I can feel it building inside of me, the slow change, and I may not be fully there but its coming. I may not be happy right now, but i will be. I am no longer moping around and avoiding responsibilities, I am doing something. I may not feel that great and I may not be so utterly enamored with what I'm doing, but its something. Maybe it will help the process along.

Maybe I am not who I want to be right now, but the journey is just as important as the end result. Now all I have left to do is to keep going, because life starts now.

Being who I am I get obsessive. I get paranoid. I get utterly, shamefully, afraid. I lie. I lie a lot, even when I don't mean to or even when I don't realize it. The moods are like different people taking the reins, and they hardly acknowledge one another's actions. Happiness can do  thousand wonderful things that sadness will never remember. Mania will think a thousand thoughts stability can never fathom even pondering.

But I guess I'm getting off track. This isn't a movie about my head. Its a tale about my drugs, my loves, and my heart.

Its funny, trading drugs that stop you from suicide to drugs that stop your body from doing just that, but this time without your permission. At least let me say its ok before self-destructing, systems. Have some common decency before sinking the ship.

Even funnier, though, is now that my lungs stopped trying to **** me, my head totally decided it was time to take that title back for itself. Funniest has to be, though, is that my worst drugs aren't even the ones I pump into my bloodstream.

With the mood meds, I also stopped taking creativity and honesty and responsibility and ambition. Goodness has it been a messy den of deception I've been nesting in for the past month. This is the first time I've really written clearly what I've been thinking since I thought I was dying. Oh, sure, there was the one time I stopped breathing, but if I wasn't breathing I obviously thought I was still dying.

I guess its really today when I take a step outside my own vanity project and look at the mess I've made. I've done nothing, been nothing, but utter horror since I got out of that hospital. I've been a terrible girlfriend, student, daughter, and friend this entire time. I shut myself away, only exposing myself to those who I had to as to not raise suspicion. Hell, I've basically acted like a class act villain, hiding away in my lair plotting and thinking while ultimately accomplishing nothing. That's what villains do, right? Lonely, misunderstood, ultimately alone people who do not see the light the way the rest of society does ultimately never win, don't they?

I was someone, months ago. I had dreams, I had friends, I had a life. Now all I have is the shadows of my family and a boyfriend who I have done nothing to deserve this past month. But I guess the darkness has gobbled me up like a yummy cake and left me an ugly, unlikable crumb of my former self.

Time to **** it the **** up. Everything hurts, everything's broken, everything;s wrong. I don't have my drugs. I don't have the endless love I once had in my heart. I'm not the girl who once spent every day with her friends, called her mom three times a week, always excelled in class, and cried when she had to let it go.

Be honest with yourself, Grace. The true thing that's killing you is that you are empty. You do not care. You worry about your lies for the self-preservation tactic of not getting caught being the bad guy, but you are. You don't know if its a mental coping mechanism to deal with the torrential emotions or a survival tactic or for the sick selfishness of not wanting to feel anymore. You feign it, affection and love, but you can only muster it out in goofiness and weak "I love you"s.

Go back to your drugs, little girl. You're only strong with a security blanket. Otherwise you're a bitter ***** with a talent for lying. Get your mood stabilizers and your expressions and your friends and your hope back. Cynicism cannot keep them from you forever, unless it truly wants to **** you.

But that would ruin the lies of how fine you are, wouldn't it?

Make it ok, make your heart ok, and finally then it will be ok to lie just a little bit, maybe just to protect yourself from realizing this heartlessness, this period of nothing, was actually real. Go back to Wonderland, Grace. It missed you.

Maybe just as much as you missed it.

Less than a month ago, I lay on a cold slab in a dark room, convinced I was dying. Tonight I lay still in my soft bed and realize, maybe I still am.

Its like suffocating, you know? Being drowned in your own ******* emotions. Only fitting that the bad blood in my veins decides to clot right there, in my lungs, in the sickest poetic justice imaginable. I couldn't breathe. Am I even breathing now?

Don't get me wrong, the doctors filled me up with pills and good fortunes, telling me I would be fine if I was careful, cautious, a perfect little good girl. And I smiled and took deep breaths even though every breath killed me. So if my lungs are fine, then why am I not breathing?

Looking back, that morning I woke with sharp pains in my sides I told the doctors I had never felt something like that before. And in a way, I wasn't lying. It had never been so physical before. But the pain, the crying, the inability to breathe, well those were things I was far too familiar with. So doctor, if I'm going to live, why am I not breathing?

****, the writer of my story is one sadistic *******. I mean, that symbolism. Choking on your own lifeblood? **** near perfect. It would have been the perfect turnaround story. The mentally unstable girl finally truly stands at death's doorstep when she doesn't want to, and she realizes maybe life is worth it. That maybe even a **** up deserves dreams, deserves happiness. The tale should have ended there, right? I learned, I had that moment when I knew I didn't want to die. I felt changed. So if I am so changed, if that is my happy ending, then why am I not breathing?

Happily ever after doesn't exist. Life doesn't work that way. Tragedy is around every corner, particularly when your chemical makeup is in a constant struggle with your will to live. But everyone is so thankful, so happy I am safe and well and normal again. **** normal. **** safe. ******* **** well. If I am so well, then why am I not breathing?

Its great, you know, knowing that the "thankful for being alive" feeling will never last for me. My wiring won't allow it. All around me everyone is so proud. They say I'm strong and brave and better. Funny thing is they totally missed the metaphor. **** my facades, **** my brain, because my blood is thinning, and my world is spinning, and I'm not breathing.

I want to be a writer, an author, a name to be remembered when it comes to the art of literature. I want my work to make people think, to matter, to maybe make this world better, even just a little.

I want to be a mother. I don't expect to be perfect, no one is, and god knows I cannot be perfect, with my ramblings and sleeplessness and all. But I know how to love and to care and to put others before me. Granted, I may forget a few punctuation marks when I'm hyper but I can at least be a wonder to my children.

I want to be in love. I mean, I am. I mean, married. I mean, forever. I love the one I'm with so much and I wish to spend every day with him, but that's not an option yet. We have to grow though being ******* college students and deal with our ******* selves and hopefully come out in the end, utterly victorious. I would love to be victorious with him.

I want to never leave wonderland. I want it to grow kinder, more manageable, but I could not understand or fair well in a world without it. Even now my fingers flicker around the keyboard, just taunting me into the thoughts racing and hand thoughts thoughts hands ****. The madness is creeping and my fingers are flying but I can manage it, and I wouldn't be me without it so I must accept it. It is part of who I am, right?

I want so many things, yet I'm too young to have them. i have to suffer through more years of editing, of waiting, of being careful before I can attain my dreams. Dreams I want now, dreams I want to scream up into the heavens so I can have them right this second and hold my babies close and read them a story of wonderland while my love smiles at us from the doorway.

I feel this is truly who I am, and I can't be. Not yet, and I hate it.

Guess for now the best I can get is the manic midnight dreaming.

You know what, this is not a love story this time. In this case, it never was. I thought it was, but I was mistaken and lied to by my lonely heart. And For once, I am standing my ground and telling you what you deserve to hear.

*******.

******* for making me so dependent on you that I was scared to stand up to you, even though you were cruel to everyone I loved. You may have thought you were cute, you may have thought it was your odd way of love, but it was honestly just an excuse to be an utter ***** to everyone and none of us should have tolerated it.

******* for competing with me. I am not a competitive person, but you'd laugh and comment how you were better, smarter, more mature. It drove me wild. Not only because your arrogance made me want to drive you into the ground, but also because it made me feel like I had to prove myself to you, brag in front of you, compete with you to feel worthy.

******* for turning on me at my weakest. Over a boy for god's sakes. I was your best friend, the one you turned to and confided in, and you started to completely disregard me over a boy I had feelings for first. You had no respect for our friendship in any facet, and it made me regret letting you in at all.

******* for always being at the back of my mind, for being so infuriatingly insidious that I have to always check up on you and worry about you even though you don't deserve it. For doing things that don't make me feel anything but pity and concern for your life, instead of being proud and maybe thinking I could accept you.

******* for making me want to **** myself. For being the selfish catalyst who showed me the cuts on her legs and made me feel so guilty that I didn't deserve life. Everyone deserves life, even the cruelest of people, and to purposefully make me feel that worthless, just to try to win me back, was the most heartless, selfish, thoughtless thing you could have ever done.

******* for being similar to me in any frivolous way, because now I am utterly terrified to be anything like you. Obsessive, rude, cruel, thoughtless, and selfish. I fear for my boyfriend, my friends, everyone around me because I know being your friend has given me the capacity to be just as ruthless as you. And I hate you for it.

******* for making me forget anything pleasurable about our relationship. All I can feel is a burning frustration when I hear your name, or an overwhelming sadness, or endless anger. None of it is pleasant.

******* for everything you've done to me, and **** the dark part of my heart that exists now because of your knives stabbing me in the back.

******* for still making me think about you, and ******* for any part of me that is like you.

I'm done with you. This is the end. Its ******* over.

And just remember.

*******.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Basically I'm saying, babe, you're hot.  You know its funny, I adore Shakespeare but i could not handle writing like him. All proper and British and modern... I'm too old fashioned for his tastes.

Let's think about it. Shakespeare was a progressive of his days; making words, analogies, that are timeless to this day.

What am I using?

Old tricks of the old writers to quell my taste for old art. Gods knows I describe everything as if I were Dickens, all elongated and profoundly bloated in the most beautiful and adoring way.

But back to where I was. You.

This sonnet is for you. I did promise one this night, did I not? In my head I did, at least. Oh dear, this'll be a surprise in the morning. But at least it is a surprise just for you.

I at least hinted of a sonnet, a sonnet for you, telling of you and our love and how it makes me feel. So here we must go.

You are the moonshine to my midnight, the angel to my demons.

Too much? I dare say, it must be, you have simply gone giddy with giggles. Perhaps a different route should be approached.

If I were a murderess, which in all heart-related actuality I am, I will give this fair promise that in all my running around and cutting out hearts, that yours will simply be those one I keep closest to mine.

Alas, too dark? Oh, my love, but there must be some way to express my doting! Be in not in a dark sonnet, or an adoring sonnet, perhaps a comedic one?

There were two things I was certain of. One, that he was a vampire, and two, that I was irrevocably attracted to him.

Oh, perhaps too comedic. Perhaps too unkind. Perhaps a bit too much paraphrasing. But I digress. Anything I can do to please you, my dearest one? Anyway I can express how I feel without making you laugh, or giggle, or simply chuckle at me?

It cannot be as simple, as you say. It cannot be as easy as holding you close and whispering in your ear how much I love you. Can it?

Well I promise, then, that I will spend my nights whispering towards you my affections, and holding you tight until you can stand my embrace no more. Will that suffice?

Oh, I love you.

And I suppose that's the best way to put it.

He's sitting there, with that intense stare, forgetting about the world and daring to care. He's not prince charming, if anything he's Shrek, but the ogre stole my heart in the end. He's beautiful, I hope everyone can see, with his open brown eyes. He's a mess I must confess but what matters is inside.

When I fell in love with him, it wasn't a fairy tale. It was tears and laughter and lies and growth. Nothing kept me going except a solid maybe and an urging instinct to leap into his arms.

When I met him it was even worse, we were looking for benefits and nothing else. But instead we found each other and a possible forever. Who would have known a thief was in my midst? Who knew he could just be it? Not I. Even though before I was interested I felt comfortable and that our hearts just might share beats, I never imagined where he could take me.

Maybe years from now I will laugh at my young heart, but I pray I look back and smile and show our grandchildren this.

How daring am I in writing. I said that aloud in written form. I admitted it. Who have I become? Its crazy how crazy in love I am with him. He changed the romantically cynical and dead into a dreaming sap.

All because he was brave enough to steal my heart. He traversed Wonderland looking for a fabled girl named Grace, simply because I intrigued him, and found instead my heart. In a turn of events, he found it so precious that he decided to keep it. My heart turned an honest man into a thief, but I would have it no other way.

Well regardless, now I must speak straight to you, my ogre thief. I am madly mad over you and happy to be your partner in crime or your princess, whatever any given day suits us. I love you, and that's what matters to me.

So keep on looking off somewhere with that intense stare of concentration and determination, because that is the you I love most. Just you.