Six years ago, the normal, brainy girl named Grace died. At least, that's when her body was found. It's likely she'd been dead a couple years longer than that. She was survived by bubbly friends and a doting family, who all were wracked by the loss.

Why is this eulogy so late, though, if she was so beloved? Because no one noticed she was dead, really dead, until today. Not even Grace.

When she noticed her brain wasn't quite right, she knew things would never be the same. That's how having a bad brain worked. She'd always be taking medicine, she'd always be watching every little move she made. It was a constant production, keeping all the parts together. Grace was strong and brave and quick to jump onto that.

However, somehow it slipped right by her how permanent everything was.

She knew to stay healthy she'd always have to be working on herself. She knew she'd constantly be changing. She knew she'd be a hard person to love.

But she didn't realize that her brain would stay broken, really broken, no matter how much of a good girl she was.

Six years ago, the girl named Grace was reserved but passionate. Extroverted but in love with her books. A straight A student. A great friend. The perfect daughter. She was messy, but she was focused. And maybe she didn't sleep a lot, but boy did she have so many dreams.

The broken brain took away invigorating, sleepless nights.

The broken brain chased off all her friends.

The broken brain tanked her grades.

The broken brain made her feel safer alone.

The broken brain made her organize everything, because it was the only thing she could control.

But what made it easier was seeing all her progress, watching the graph of her illness rise, even if it was still a jagged line. Grace felt that even if she was broken and moody and difficult that she was getting better.

But today, everything changed.

Looking at all her meds and all her schedules and all her coping strategies and all her perfect practices in place, and still feeling hollow inside, she realized it wasn't just that other people couldn't fix her and make her whole again.

She couldn't either.

No matter how hard she worked, or how much she believed, or how many times she corrected for every little warning sign, she would always be sick. Grace could do everything in her power to make things easier, do everything right, but nothing was going to fix her brain. It's almost like Bipolar Disorder is a chronic illness or something.

After all this hopeful time, she had to accept it wasn't just that past Grace was gone, it was that the ease and sanity that came with her was dead, too.

Being the perfect good girl Grace just never will be enough. Not to make her healthy again. If she spends what's left of her life trying to find that, she'll always be disappointed.

While old Grace, sane Grace, is survived by a neater, hardened Grace, she will be missed. The late night homework and laughing sleepovers and baked goods for classmates and indomitable confidence in the things she loves most are gone.

All we have left is to stand tall and move forward.

It's all we've ever had.

Television makes it sound like a fun, 30-60 minute adventure into the lives of our favorite comedy or drama characters. But not for me. For me, an episode swells up through my soul and eats me from the inside out. The story doesn't get a comic relief, or a satisfying arc.

All it gets is cyclical, depressed me.

Where creativity and dreams once thrived, there lives a barren waste of hopelessness. Its like my body is in constant phasing shifts between dimensions. One place, I'm normal. I'm a writer in a dry spot trying to figure out where to go from here. Another, the world and my mind are boundless and I could be on the precipice of becoming exactly who I want to be, whoever she may be. And the last, everything's been gutted and that shadow of a woman dreaming has been reaped of her happiness; there's nowhere good on the horizen, only desolation.

If my moods were a television series, they'd only leave fans dissatisfied and sad. They get to watch a hopeful stargirl dream of the universe only for her body to crush her mind from the inside. Its like watching her sharply get possessed, like watching a hopeful underdog tale with the ghost looming quietly in every shot. Before anyone would know it, this star story turned into a horror-fest.

Like this, I'm so tired. I'm not someone wanting to make the world better. I'm not a writer with big, celestial dreams. I'm not a woman on the cusp of adulthood and the truths of her future.

I'm a wanderer, lost in the nuclear fallout of her own head. And its exhausting.

That's not an episode anyone really ever wants to see.

Its been a long while since I rambled in the night, while my head won't get tired and everything feels like lightening.

But two years later and its just like I remember. Makes my skin itch a bit less, but here I am, alone late at night, whirling about in my in-congruent thoughts. There's an electric peace about it, the mix of its familiarity and its origin.

Not surprising after my first big low of the summer that I have my first big high. Just kinda odd how easy it all feels. Its no pounding, screaming, kicking, biting. Its just like a neighbor stopping by.

I guess now to the ramblings. The expounding expression of my random, endless thoughts to get them out of my head and try to get me to bed.

I thought about love a lot on my way to work. Granted, I work only a five minute walk from home. But I remembered how the definitive point in time where I decided what kind of love meant most to me happened in the worst summer of my life, the most hopeless depression I ever felt.

Mom liked that I was quiet about it.

Dad was oblivious.

Friends forgot I existed.

Then there was him, the one I never expected. He was angry. So angry.

He was so upset he was losing the person he loved to my depression and he felt helpless to do anything about it. He needed me to fight. He needed me to get better. He couldn't stand watching who I was fade away.

He yelled at me.

I don't know where I'd be if he hadn't.

I'd been content to float, to hide behind my childhood walls and use the same tactics that hid my mental turmoil all of my life. If no one saw it, it was ok. Its what my parents always taught me.

Yet he looked at me, heard my mentions of pain and non-existence, and couldn't stand it. He didn't want me to change, or never be crazy. He just wanted me to have a will to fight it. To get better.

He didn't want to lose me just because it was so much easier.

I think its why I began to hate my parents, for awhile. Compared to wanting to set me on fire to save me? How could their naive complacence compare? I hid a lot from them, I grant. But that summer I told my mom I wanted to be hospitalized.

She said no.

If no one saw it, it was ok, right?

I couldn't stand all the years I spent trapped between those walls, feeling like I was hiding some mythic beast inside me, like I had to do everything right because everything in me was wrong. Outside, I was their cheery, sweet, smart, empathetic perfectionist. Inside, I was a passionate, dark humored, fireball of curiosity and imagination and limitless possibilities. The two never quite meshed, but I never got the chance to find a way to do that. Only the chance to force them apart.

Makes relationships hard when you've become two people. And once the other one shows up, everything changes. You're a lie, now.

Things are starting to mesh better, little by little. But its been a long journey.

Seems quiet acceptance isn't the love I like most. Fire is.

And its even wilder now that, after years of moving away from that isolation and pain, I'm finding a new belonging in the things that I used to cope. I thought they were all just silly things I did because I had nothing else. Now I prefer to do them instead.

As if on cue, I'm distracted by some writing and my head is slowly calming. I guess its my cue to bid this adieu. Always fascinating, how a thought-dump helps settle an insomniatic head.

I was ok but I was anxious
I tried to rest to stop twitching, stop groaning, stop my head from ******* pounding
It wasn't worth it
Once my brain stop ticking like a broken clock it settled back down here again
Depressed again
I wondered why this keeps on happening
Not the obvious reason, my bipolar condition isn't the interesting part anymore
But why down now?
Why have things changed?
Then I look outside and am reminded the glaring sun feels so exhausting alone
I only felt better and laid down my crazy head when rain was pouring
I wanted to go outside and drown in it
I was cold
I was lonely
But rain has always made things feel better when everything swings
SAD
Most people hate the winter but for me its the opposite
The burning sky
The heat
The loose skin
I'd rather be wrapped up in my sweater and have the sky not remind me how unbright I can be inside
Its hard to pretend to be brighter than you are next to the sun
In the darkness its easier to be bright
But
Its also easier to feel like the entire universe isn't watching you fail
Easier to feel like even the sky is sad sometimes
I've always felt worse in summers, haven't I?
Funny I never noticed it until now
Funny it fit well with school and college
Now it just makes me feel broken
But a lot of things make me feel broken, don't they?
Guess this is just another

For a story never to be told, this is my time capsule, my floating space in history, where a never will be meets what could have been and my bleeding heart pours out its buckets of blood before turning back to endless, changing life.

I don't know what to call you.

It feels too sentimental and cruel to call you my baby when from the second I knew you existed I knew you were a bundle of cells I was unfit to hold. That you were a less than 1%, an accident, a medical anomaly that caused my body far more harm than good. Its all so easy and clinical to know if A meets Y then X must occur until the scenario plays out before your baffled eyes. But how can I call you a baby when you were doomed from the start?

Every moment you were in my body, I was painfully ill. I don't know if I've ever been that all-consumingly sick in my life. Coming from someone who suffered crippling bipolar disorder and suicidal ideation, its a hard pill to swallow. But I was dying with you.

Less than a week without you and I feel better than I have in over a month. I feel human again. I feel I can finally be myself again.

So why do I feel something hollow within me, then?

Maybe its less about you and more what you meant. Only a little over a month in and I was miserable, in constant pain, nausea, and exhaustion. Near the end of your tenure I wanted the whole ship to go down sometimes. The only thing that kept me floating, horribly, tragically, was the knowledge it would all be over soon. It would all be over without you.

Living 10 weeks with you made me accept I don't think I can ever have another you. Not my A, not my love's X. I'm too sick. Losing you doesn't hurt when I know you wouldn't have lived well. Losing you hurts because I don't think I could survive 9 months carrying a different one I could keep. Not even if I prepared for it.

The idea of loving a kid someone else blossomed is something I've never minded. Beautiful, smiling cheeks are on all little wild ones. But the idea of accepting I don't get the choice of having one that has its father's devious smirk, or its uncle's laugh, or its grandmother's kind eyes, all because I'm too sick?

It breaks my heart.

Losing you is one more way my body has failed me. It feels like some patchwork tug boat carrying a resilient sailor, convinced to keep it going. And of course I will, I always persist. I just might have to accept I never will be strong enough for any passengers.

I love my family. I love my partner. I just wish I didn't have to throw away their beautiful genetics and chromosomic heritage because my body can't do what it should.

It wasn't just you I aborted last week. It was recent, over-optimistic, flyby dreams that maybe I could have someone like you. At least I learned I was wrong before I flew too far away.

And for now we focus on other things with words and videos and creative explosions. Its no time for wombs and their disappointments. Despite the pain its caused me, its time for me to get back to treating my old, patchy tug boat well. Sadly it had to happen to you, however, the story of me is not aborted.

Like all unsunken ships, I have to carry on.

For ****'s sake.

How did we end up here again?

The soothing, annoying word flickers on my blue-back lit screen and I am ****** back to the tumultuous moment when once upon a time it yelled bipolar.

And here we go again.

My thoughts flick, flit, floss between teeth made for biting and real meat. They need plaque, collection, to grow and accumulate mass to progress. But there my flicking thoughts go, flossing.

I've always struggled focusing, but I just got excitable, got manic, and it would solve everything. Mania was my monster, my red bull, and now that its sated and off to Wonderland...

I'm left here, face to face, with a twitchy white rabbit wondering why I would ever think to use my pretty little head when its such a good projectile into the sky.

I had always wondered, in those whispering nights, when my hands couldn't stop moving and my head wouldn't shut up, if something was wrong. But it was silly, I had two already, full of worry then full of poles. Couldn't be another, could it?

Of course, a Grace of Wonderland always knows best, and here we are. Another bottle to drink to keep me sane.

I wonder if my fingers will thank the capsules when I might stop biting them? Or my toes? Is this why my toes always twitch and dance, why they stand center-stage in so many of my mild fantasies? After all these years, the divas that my lower digits have become may not appreciate losing their star titles.

I just want to be fine. I want to figure out how to move beyond all the strange misfires in my head. How did I survive so long without a notice? Inflates my ego to know I should have been caught by now.

Guess just like the White Rabbit, despite my widgets and worries, no one can stop me from running when I'm madly, absolutely, refusing to be late.

Graces only knows to fight with fire and fists. Tis the state of my Wonderland, and perhaps now things will only get better.

My family and me are complicated, to say the least.
I spent childhood idolizing them.
Teenagedom questioning them.
College disconnecting from them.
And now I'm an adult and all I feel is that I miss them.

It took me awhile to realize that, but its far more complicated than just missing their presence. I miss the connections we had. I miss who we were together before the great big Jabberwocky of Wonderland waltzed into our lives. I miss the people they were when they were happier. I miss the person I was when I was happy with them.

I miss much more than this moment. I miss everything I've lost because of what's happened over the last few years.

I've spent a lot of time hoping to never be like them. Yet now I just want a way back to them. A healthy way.

It'll be hard. It might even hurt a little. But to be able to think I might have the parts of them that used to make me so happy?

I have to at least try.

There's always this poisonous barb in the back of my head luring me in and telling me that maybe I'm just dead. But not really dead, its not a dumb, parasitic barb. Just dead in my head and clearly exaggerating the good that lies in my stead. After all, what true good is someone who's not all right in the head?

It goes away and I wane, and I start to feel strong and sane. I feel maybe the things swirling around in my brain are not just caged beasts but like songs with refrains, like cells with membranes. Whole, complete, useful.

Yet as I get confident it yells at me to be confident I'm not confident. I confidently yell at it to shut the hell up and stride forward, but then the traits I'm confident in are told to be less confident, and others tell that its not good enough to be confident, and then I'm less confident. But I'd only be good if I was more confident, you see, there we go, the dilemma in the madness, the plum in my proverbial pudding. I think I'm too good yet not good enough all at once.

What the **** am I?

I'm my own strongest motivation yet my own personal hell. All the things I say sound brilliant yet ridiculous all at once and its just stuck swirling inside my head and its beautiful and disgusting. I'm a genius yet an idiot. Gifted yet totally talentless. I can't catch which way sometimes what it is. Am I too ******* myself or am I just fooling myself into thinking I'm something I'm not and no one has the heart to tell the fool she's not special?

Why would anyone ever make humans like this?

I do know one thing I was a fool about, though. The one thing that I like to forget that's in my head.

That when it comes to the disorder that plagues my synapses, I'm not that special. It has its good times and its bad. But I had been so good lately I...

I was confident that I would just stay better.

That's the one thing I'm confident I was wrong about, because today I did something that normally would make me weep for joy and I felt nothing. Feeling nothing about something I love so much hurts more than I can bear.

What the **** am I?

I was so confident a few months ago. And parts of my head are still confident now. But I don't know who to trust anymore when all I've heard is nothing and no. It makes me feel adrift in an open sea, and the worst part is I thought I knew the waters below me, but now I can't tell where I am at all.

I'm confident that right now that I'm lost.

The water slipped over my hands, through my hands, and I felt a chill run through my spine. Most chills left me with one or two shivers and  a cold disposition, but this one left me with a feeling as if the core of my soul had be realigned. My eyes closed. There was a unique serenity in how it remained moving, fluid, yet hard to the touch. Is this what its like to be apart of a river? Where your entire being is melded into an ever-changing ecosystem? Every droplet slipped through my fingers, yet I never found calamity in it. Only a sense of calm that is often forgone by my synapses. In the darkness behind my eyelids, one with a water wall, a chaotic mind was found at peace.

You know, the better I get overall the worse my relationship with sleep gets.

I keep on trying. I know its healthier. I know its good for me. But no matter how hard I try, its so easy to forget. So easy to just keep going.

I'm not good at stopping. I don't like to stop.

I'm like a telegram with run-on sentences. Sometimes, innovative and brilliant. other times, incomprehensible.

I'm on the precipice of so much excitement and joy that, per usual, sleep takes a back seat. I'm bad at not letting it take a back seat. Its just so good at taking the back seat.

To be honest, I'm better with sleep with him around. And its less because he's some magic cure-all, and more he makes me calmer and I can't stay on my phone haphazardly or turn on the lights and write with another person in the bed.

More to be honest, this has less of a point and more a myriad of ramblings in hope to get myself sleepy and able to fall asleep. Because despite my rebellious mindset, I do wish to sleep eventually.

I even tried waking up early yesterday. Didn't work.

I dunno what to do. I'm pretty bad at this. If my insides aren't screaming I tend to question it less. But, perhaps, as an adult, I should question it a little more.

Maybe sleep's just heading in my bedhead.

I've never heard more people in my life insist they are good at something more than driving. Nearly every person I know has insisted to me that they are a great driver. And when its an off day? "I swear, most days I'm great though". I'm never quite sure if its because no one is often there to judge them but themselves, or if its hard for them to accept they are only adequate at something they do day in and day out.

As someone who has only ever held a permit myself, I am fascinated by this phenomenon. Its as if its unthinkable to accept that you're only okay or average or even bad at something everyone does. I've found similar results with cooking. Anytime I tell someone I'm good at it, they burst in with their own stories of their good cooking, though I never was comparing them.

I don't understand the inability to accept inadequacies. They are a part of who they are. Mind you, I conversely also believe to accept greatnesses. But Doesn't it diminish those greatnesses if you don't fully accept your misfalls?

Myself, as an easy example. I can't legally drive. I love science but hate research and laboratory processes. I can't stop myself from questioning math long enough to understand it. I get really obsessive about making lists, and I have to do them before doing things, even if they end up wrong. I write novels inefficiently, because I prefer to write them out of order, which ultimately tends to lead to wasted scenes. I hate citrus. I'm near addicted to weird things. I'm fiercely independent and protective of it. I like to stay up late and get up early and struggle with enjoying sleep.

But I have greatnesses. I am a wonderful writer, particularly realistic fiction novels. I am great at technical writing, because I love science but understand rhetoric and audience-driven communication. I am super intelligent artistically, and have a level of creative innovation and drive that baffles even me sometimes. I am wonderful at questioning everything and giving good insight. I am adaptable. I like vegetables.

I feel like accepting these inadequacies makes me inadequate. I think they make me human. I would never try to tell someone I'm good at driving. I'm not. But i hope to be passable. I want to get better to the point of making me a better, functioning person, but good? C'mon. Inflating myself won't make me better. It'll just make me bloated.

Sometimes being inadequate is kinda okay, as long as you have your own personal greatness too.

I've never heard more people in my life insist they are good at something more than driving. Nearly every person I know has insisted to me that they are a great driver. And when its an off day? "I swear, most days I'm great though". I'm never quite sure if its because no one is often there to judge them but themselves, or if its hard for them to accept they are only adequate at something they do day in and day out.

As someone who has only ever held a permit myself, I am fascinated by this phenomenon. Its as if its unthinkable to accept that you're only okay or average or even bad at something everyone does. I've found similar results with cooking. Anytime I tell someone I'm good at it, they burst in with their own stories of their good cooking, though I never was comparing them.

I don't understand the inability to accept inadequacies. They are a part of who they are. Mind you, I conversely also believe to accept greatnesses. But Doesn't it diminish those greatnesses if you don't fully accept your misfalls?

Myself, as an easy example. I can't legally drive. I love science but hate research and laboratory processes. I can't stop myself from questioning math long enough to understand it. I get really obsessive about making lists, and I have to do them before doing things, even if they end up wrong. I write novels inefficiently, because I prefer to write them out of order, which ultimately tends to lead to wasted scenes. I hate citrus. I'm near addicted to weird things. I'm fiercely independent and protective of it. I like to stay up late and get up early and struggle with enjoying sleep.

But I have greatnesses. I am a wonderful writer, particularly realistic fiction novels. I am great at technical writing, because I love science but understand rhetoric and audience-driven communication. I am super intelligent artistically, and have a level of creative innovation and drive that baffles even me sometimes. I am wonderful at questioning everything and giving good insight. I am adaptable. I like vegetables.

I feel like accepting these inadequacies makes me inadequate. I think they make me human. I would never try to tell someone I'm good at driving. I'm not. But i hope to be passable. I want to get better to the point of making me a better, functioning person, but good? C'mon. Inflating myself won't make me better. It'll just make me bloated.

Sometimes being inadequate is kinda okay, as long as you have your own personal greatness too.

Freedom feels like sore thighs and *** dreams, where the epicenter of forever lies in forgetting everything but now.
It makes you wonder sometimes if its just a sharper spike of ASMR or the tickling truths of your soul pricking you on the back of the neck, electrically, as you do all the things in the dark you only heard whispers of as a child.
But there's a real something about how a pair of tongues collide and a summer's day turns into a summer's night, where a young girl goes out to play but returns a grown woman back from partying with one hell of a bite.
How can't you feel like you're flying when just a little to the left and you're seeing starlight in broad day and all the lies you were told to protect your innocence, or womanhood, or whatever to protect the ego of elders and mortality hung over your education like a plague?
For me, I can't help but do the cliche bitten lip and think about all the words that jumble in my head to burn me up before bed.
Yet that fire, as I got older, became more wild and curious and burned without asking just starving for the answer to what was the surprise between my legs that was some sort of angelic kingdom to hide from the boys like they were pillagers and not people.
Funnily, I dragged some ****** boy into the fires and felt some expressive liberty I had never experienced, no one giving a **** about the **** in my head or the **** who I was, just ******* me.
My ****** renaissance led to a swift beheading of the boy, who to my knowledge has yet to grow into a man, yet that feeling of validating importance yet complete erasure of all of my fears and pains has made freedom one hell of a hot, three letter word.  
If I hold on tighter my fingertips feel grafted onto his skin, and without words or letters my whole universe has found some landing just from pleasure and a pinch.
If I kiss his lips and he smiles beneath, there's a roaring power of how letting him touch me brings my body the earth while also tossing it up like a kite, ready to fly the winds, for once careless.  
If my hair gets pulled a little harder I can nearly feel the Declaration of my ****** Independence on my lips and old society lady Great Britain scowling from its high castle, putting its hand together in judgmental prayer thinking it'll never last; I'll come back (I won't).
Freedom feels like forgetting to try to do anything right and ******* everything up, in the best and worst ways, only to come out strong and laughing and better than before.
Freedom is like *** because no one has the right to do anything to my body; not the educators who think I'm forever too young, not the boys who think my **** are rocking but don't know my name, not the parents who lock me up with a key only to find I was born to fit through the bars, not the girls who spell S-L-U-T like its their accusatory safe word against being alone in an unjust world, not anyone.
No one except the syllables between my lips and the brain behind the way I swing my hips, and they say: Hell Yes.

In a dream, in a life, in a future yesterday, the world is completely different from one lily-pad step I took on the fourth of May. 21 years spent ogling these maybes, these otherwheres, these fantastical infinite people and these wild infinite loves and intense infinite failures I could have had. I spend much time pondering them, but never wistfully, just thoughtfully. I regret none of the nowhere I am, so I wouldn't wish it away, but because of my reckless mind I wonder regardless of reason and logic.

But today, I wondered what if I stopped letting myself wonder and started letting myself dream.

I spent most of those maybe 21 years locked in a tower were maybes were the only hopes I had. But, below the tower as I now am, maybe maybe isn't all I have anymore. Maybe yes can be my new maybe. Maybe why not can be it.

As a writer, by condition i ask what could have been, what maybe could happen, but I struggle with why nots. With the bravery of a careening carousal ride or the average person of my age. I have let an inkling suspection that the world may **** me deter from all adventure. I've worked on it, but the acidic pinpricks on my skin make me cower like all alien-fearers should.

But funnily, I feel like an alien. So why not brave the danger by brandishing a hook and baring my own blood?

Today, I listed all the maybes I could be, and decided I should try some. Maybe I won't do them all. Maybe I'll hate them. But maybe I shouldn't give a ****. Maybe I should stop looking back and seeing all the turns I took that culminate in a loss of some wild experience, and look towards what is happening and see the maybes that lie before me.

Maybe I could have been a crack addict. Maybe I could have fallen in love with a different him/her. Maybe I could have drunk acid and be staring at my skeleton bones from the smooth waters of hell.

But  didn't.

So maybe, instead, I could be a yoga lover, and maybe my hair could be green, and maybe i could get over my fears of being even a little bit cool.

Just maybe.

I was born under the earth in the eye of a blizzard, stormy from the first.
I took my first step off the edge of a rabbit hole and my next underwater.
I spoke first in melodies, finding the average tongue a little too heavy.
I breathed through flower petals, filtering the toxins of being human.
I made friends with the firelight that kept me and the shadows awake.
I watched soft skin of beating hearts hide under layers of organs, lonely.
I saved my fingerprints each time they fell off, to collect the marks of me.
I climbed pebbles to help them hope they could one day be mountains.
I screamed at the sky to see if it ever let itself be free to scream back.
I toppled ice cream sodas for their reign need make way for push-pops.
I slept in tide pools, giving my luminescent skin as a starfish nightlight.
I danced in the darkness of caves, making friends with bats over men.
I soared through bedrock, so the lava monsters had an ally with eyes.
I feared every twitch of life before me, but observed in stoic fascination.
I turned into a humming black bird to meet the leaves giraffes eat.
I wished on shooting satellites, because stars had enough burdens.
I dreamed of otherwheres, of thistle branches with tiger lily eyes.
I vacationed with fireflies when the moonlight asked me to care for them.
I wandered the world as a written ghost, hiding behind trees until I say:
I am.

Well, its been two years since the night I sat up late dreaming of other worlds that seemed so far away.

Yet here they are, nearly before me.

Its crazy, looking between that moment and now. I was honest and hopeful, yet all those things I wished for seemed worlds away.

Well, worlds away just turned into 3 months.

I've finished my first real novel. I'm a third through my new one. The inevitability of me being a real author is sharp and bright and awe-inspiring. I've written things that make people think and feel and hopefully have the ability to make a difference.

I'm running across the country with that man I love. Its happening. I am in love. I feel forever in love. I no longer sit and question the maybes; I feel he is for me, as long as he is who he is and breathes on this earth and walks beside me. And I soon get to wake up to him every morning for as long as we're together. Its something else, I tell you.

Wonderland has gotten kinder. I have become stronger, and things are figuring themselves out. I'm figuring myself out. Its new and terrible and great and exciting. The world of Wonderland is before me, and I am no longer afraid.

I wanted these so many things, and I'm fingertips away from them. They're mine. Its jaw-dropping. Its nearly a surprise.

Except it isn't. It logically feels that way, but in my heart it only feels right. Now, I have my writing. I have my novels. I have my love. I have my wonderland. I have my future.

All the things I ever wanted are mine, and its more than I ever thought I would get. My dreaming isn't just dreaming anymore. Everything I dreamed of is real, and you know what?

Its better than I dreamed. Far better.

My feelings on the world are a complex dichotomy. If I could control the world, my rule would be to control nothing. To give freedom and agency to everyone and let every culture and kind shine as they do and **** superiority and focus on growth, not *******.

But, not all people aren't as communally minded as that. And though in theory I could change the rules, I can't change people.

In its own way, that's beautiful. The visceral strength and resiliency of humanity fascinates me, with the chaotic undertones that lie beneath every eye. I love the spectrum of pain and brilliance it brings. But it also makes a utopian world of understanding and lack of control impossible to keep people safe; because never will there be a human race that doesn't at least have some people craving absolute control.

I think this dichotomy within myself parallels my standing with humanity very well. There is something on most every end I can find fascinating: free will, selflessness, unpredictability, tenacity. But also I can never seem to be pleased with how humanity could be but never amount to.

Not that it gives me much trouble. I've always kept humanity at an arm's length, choosing books and stories over the flesh-bags in front of my face. The only thing I ever struggled with was not being normal with my human relationships, and trying to make my methods match.

My methods won't match because I might as well be an alien for all I care about directly interacting with humanity.

Yet, I love humanity, in a way. I could write about human transcendence and growth until I die. I am madly in love with human potential. But I don't love humans. I don't love a species that muscle arms its way into dominance and can be arrogant and small-minded. After all we've managed to accomplish, and we're still start wars over skin color and scapegoating? Its laughable, in a way.

I suppose I look at humanity as if I was an alien scientist. I have no way of measuring things or conducting research because I'm foreign, but I can see the greatness in their eyes and am floored by it. Yet I also see the violence in their eyes and am repelled by it. The most tragic, push and pull love of my life has been for this species.

I've learned lately I'm okay with being alien. But its strange to find a foothold in a world where I feel constantly at odds and different.

But I like strange, so I think its what works best.

Between humanity and me, things are complicated. Things are wonderful and painful and all worth the while in its own, ****** way. I suppose all I have is my words and I'll share them, and humanity can listen if it will. I hope it will. I hope it can help people who feel like aliens too, and maybe then being an alien and a human can be easier.

But for those things, we'll just have to see.

The wreckage is hard to stare at. I think some part of me knew I was flying a little too close to the sun, and that's what makes this even worse.

Picking up the pieces after a crash landing are some of the worst times, I believe. The crash itself is painful and confusing, but cleanup is just left with the pain and analytical assessment. How'd it fail? What went wrong? What should I have done better?

I've never loved crash landings, but as a person who's adept at doing them, at least they don't go too terribly. Doesn't mean I enjoy doing them, though. Doesn't mean I don't sometimes get the feeling I should get my pilot's license revoked.

Yet another crash landing, and my shoulders hurt and my hands ache. But its just another day.

I'm just tired today and I know its rational, but its so hard not to just throw all the blame on me and glare at this human vessel like its a disappointment. I should have known better. I should have worked harder. I should be the best pilot, not just the best crash lander.

But yet again, its just like any other day after a crash.

Perhaps tomorrow will be better.

There's some sort of magic between the eyes of a resting jaguar. Their languid yawn, opening the gaping maw that lies between their strong teeth, more energetic than their tired paws.

Still and regal, wearing muscles like fine silks, their fur like that final kingly cape and their ears their crown.

A zoo jaguar once met my eyes and in a deadlocked stare, saw the camera in my hands, and turned his head to pose. A prince always knows when to please his peasantry. As a pleased peasant, I snapped pictures and nearly cried at his serene posture behind a wall of glass. There was some sort of uncharted beauty in the way he spoke without words oversaturating his meanings. It was a way I wished to speak. He was a comrade behind glass, silent yet observant and knowing. Though my head might be a good fit for a maw, I nearly wanted to keep him close company.

The dark spots that adorn his body are the only betrayers of the fierce undertones of his monarchy. Well, except for the teeth, of course.

Though I try to unlock my gaze and detach from the gossamer threads that were beginning to tie, the jaguar eyes and jaguar prince incessantly seep into my brain, for when I close my eyes all I can see is theirs staring back at me. All I want is just one hand, a single touch, a gift to feel their crowns and robes, to experience the powerful royalty beneath their quiet eyes, even if being taken by their maw may end up being the price.

My affection becomes jarred by the human hand jostling my wrist, and I blink for the first time since seeing the posing feline prince. My head turns, trance averted, and I'm looked at with perplexion as my body has sidled up to the glass, and the Jaguar, now alert, is swinging its tail and staring in wonderment at me.

My eyes magnetize back to their rightful place, his green eyes on my green eyes, and I wonder what lives we would live like if I could see into his mind and know what's he's like. Perhaps we would be friends, or family, or hunters, or partners, in that other life.

Or, perhaps he'd want to eat me nonetheless.

One more camera shot of my jaguar prince, and a silent nod as he situates himself back to his pose. Restful, regal, serene. Turning away, I feel myself leave a part of me that always stays with him and taking that part of him that stays with me.

Every wild eye does, and our secret we will keep.

When I was 15 I had no real friends, and that was okay. Being shut up alone inside was fine as long as I didn't give myself time to think. I had some laughs, and I had classmates, and I wrote and wrote and wrote and it was alright.

But then the **** boy had to sing.

Not just musically, though god knows he did that wonderfully too. He sang to me with his weirdness and brains and odd duck humor that I relished in.

We even really met in a musical, as poetic as it is.

I spent every afternoon around him, and I thought he just laughed back at me in his confident, beautiful, lyrical way. I was a little in love with him.

One day I found myself shouting at him about being prying, and him at me for being secretive, and somehow it ended with me telling him that he was my secret. That the way I could close my eyes and picture the road map of his heart through the words that he sang was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

It was the first day I ever heard him stutter.

After some awkward verbal fumblings and confused wires, we collided, two insecure children thinking we were artistic adults. We saw ourselves as some grand creative romance when really we were two weird kids finding infatuation under bright stage lights.

After a few weeks more stumbling, and harsh words around, that initial fizzling collision just kept on colliding until our heads were jostled a little too well.

I broke his heart in a high school hallway, only a month after we began.

Like the artist he was, he poetically asked me for a final kiss before letting me go.

Also, poetically, it ended up not being our final kiss at all. But trust me, despite my desperation to try the collisions and passion again, he made sure that second final kiss really was the last.

That was the end of our love story.

When will I ever be satisfied?

Will the earth have to shake and the heavens burst open and the almighty whomever have to come down specifically to me and award me for my good improvement?

Will I have to become a perfect, ethereal being who feels nothing but strength and goodness and saves the entire land?

Will I have to not be me anymore?

What do I have to do to stop feeling so defeated by merely doing things that come naturally to my breathing self?

What do I have to think to stop hating myself at every ounce of weakness that i show, no matter how human?

What do I have to give up to ever not be inevitably dissatisfied with myself every once in awhile, having to accept this occasional misery or frustration to keep myself alive?

What does it take to be happy with who I am?

What is it like to be satisfied?

I don't know if I've ever known.

My heart has walked the line, finding its place in its world and the place in my world where you settle and its all a bit of a whirl.

For a woman who doesn't believe in soulmates, you've become a lovely enigma of where I can't picture my life without you and you are the only one I want. Where you are the only star bright enough for me to want to fall through the tremendous skies to try to catch.

Its my constant hypocrisy, looking at you and seeing this heart I want only for me, a heart that seems to be so attuned to my own beats. A heart that seems so fateful sometimes I wonder how there cannot be some sort of universal intervention to lead me to you. It was all by such chance. I never expected, or even truly asked, for you.

Yet here you are.

And as I blink into the dim starlight, I think I know what you are, and how I can live between my two philosophies of you being meant for me yet our souls being nothing but the best coincidence I've had the honor to experience.

Its like I've said, writing, if anything, is my soulmate. I was made to write, to caress words like a fabled lover. Writing is on my belt, always on my hip, burning at the tip of the bone and something that will never leave me, no matter what. It is my personal and promised companion in an uncertain universe.

Yet something, in my darkest hours, sent me the brightest star I've ever seen to light my way and guide me towards my authorial happiest. True, I can nearly see less-lit paths in which I could be happy and even possibly, in a way, just as happy as this one.

But with writing on my hip, and this twinkle in my eye, you showed up and were everything I could have wished for and more.

That's what's so crazy about all of it; I even did wish for it, long ago when I was knee-deep in a passion for fantasy and true loves. I dreamt of a sandy hair boy with a flare for rebellion, loving all things unique. A man who liked to stick himself on motorcycles and see how fast they can go, who felt often alone but never let it ruin who he was. A person so strong yet so internally solitary a person like couldn't help but be magnetized.

I thought of my character as the hero, but oddly enough my proudest role for her, my facsimile, was to stand by the sandy-haired man and love him in his brilliance in a way only she could see. To be the only one to stand by him wherever life may lead, and be as damnedly brilliant right by his side.

But their connection and love?

It was the true protagonist of my stories of the Sander boy and his quirky girl.

Part of it is fantastically terrifying how much of them I see in us, of how much of my teenage love dream came true when I never asked it to. By the age of eighteen I had abandoned romance. I thought no one would want me, not the way I was. I didn't think there would ever be a man, let alone a sandy-haired one, in my future.

And then there was you.

Its ludicrous. Its all madness, looking at you sometimes. I never thought I'd be so lucky. I never planned for you. Yet look where we are.

We're brilliant.

So in its own way, my ideas hold true. I don't quite believe in soulmates, for love is unexpected and telling yourself you only get it once is cold and painful. But I look at the paths before me and you illuminate the one that has me and you and it looks so beautiful.

I am writing and I am so happy, and you are so brilliant right next to me and we're so happy.

I could be happy elsewhere. But after knowing you and following you like the north star, letting your light be my guide, picking you out of all the stars I could have had....

I can't regret anything, and I can't picture myself loving anyone so brilliantly and passionately as I feel with you. I could be wrong, I could be a fool, but **** it. Tonight, for every night I've known you, your brightness has surprised me and filled me with so much love.

For now, you are my north star, the thing that directs my path as I illuminate the night with you. I might be a pessimist, and maybe the universe did plan this all perfectly like a well-constructed art-piece. Or maybe I'm being an optimist, and we only found each other by luck, two ships in the night that happened to collide happily.

No matter the circumstances, there's no one else I love to traverse the infinite sky with more. After some polishing I've found my own brilliance, but with you it grows so much stronger.

I found in you what was lost in me, and I'll stay with you as long as you stay bright on me.

There it was
In my head
Screaming at me
Wishing I was dead
Between the pages
I learned to live again
Be somewhere other
Than the wasteland
In my head

I learned to be a princess
A warrior
A brilliant fool
Anything but what was actually true
Grew chameleon skin
To flicker better
Between character to character
Just like the weather
All to forget the truth of what
Lingered within my head

It was fun playing perfect
Being everyone's art
But things started to get hazy
When cracks began to part
My body became numb
I let fingers crawl all over
Payment to get anyone
To glue me back together
But I couldn't really run
Nothing could blot out its stead
Unbeknownst to me
I never had been free
From the temptation to be dead
Preying on my head

So I buried in words harder
Trusting the denial
Pretending to be anything else
Must be a new character
Couldn't really just be me
The fingers grabbed harder
And I hungrily let them still
If my flesh became shredded
What would be left to ****?
Yet determination was stronger
Than my bloodlust to ****** me
It only left me screaming
Left me lonely
Left me in dread
From the death taking residence
Inside my pretty head

Our character knew
She could not live such asunder
The death would win
If she did not change her color
Through wretched teeth
And fierce blows of power
The foolish, brilliant princess warrior
Refused to lose her mental tower
Through years of war
And struggle
And pain
She won the rights to herself again
And with her mighty sword led
Away the demons
Inside her head

And now the tale halts
Where the chameleon begins to change
A lovely new form
One haphazard and so strange
Its a visage mixed of all
The characters played before
Yet now the skin's unmoving
And the parts become a whole
The fingers are only one
And soft and loving to touch
And pills and words are now used
For good instead of a crutch
The death has hissed its final roar
The reader final quits
They keep on reading stories
But they do not negatively benefit
Its more at peace
But still a clustered composure
Within the head
Of a happy dreamer much bipolar

If I close my eyes I smell the butter of fresh popcorn and hear the whirring of a laptop powerful and bright. Can taste the dichotomy of the crisp melting of the popped kernel in my mouth, feel the happiness of being in a desk chair in front of a screen and surrounded by books.

Then I open my eyes and see I have to edit everything I've written to be even vaguely coherent.

Happiness is hard when you're never satisfied. When the childhood curiosity stapled to your youthful lips never unpinned as you aged. Neither did the idealistic expectations. Couple that with a pessimistic anxiety disorder and a mood disorder to swing things between the two disparities and it gets a little more complicated.

I've been my most relieved and anxious in this place of empty, of nowhere, that I've settled myself into for the next three weeks. A piece of me enjoys the rest and possibilities. The other hates it for those exact reasons.

I need to breathe, I tell myself. Being so separate is my fault, I insist.

But another voice in my head pipes up quietly, offering a new idea. I'm demonizing myself for not being ideas, for not being normal, for not being one.

But perhaps be bipolar, in more ways than just disorder, is exactly what concocts the human I like being.

Perhaps the great empathetic thoughtfulness yet great introspection work so well in tandem.

Maybe the assertive extroversion yet pleasured isolation balance in their own, special way.

In a way, I might just need to look back on the old Sunday afternoon specials and speak to myself the lessons of their half-hour programs. In particular, admit maybe its ok if I'm weird. perhaps its ok I just be the own odd balance that is me.

The Nowhere, the empty, can be itchy with the possibilities sometimes. Yet these moments, that help me breathe through my own neurotics and idiosyncrasies, may just be the best kind of nothing.

Maybe the bothersome nowhere can also be something grand and great for me as well.

There perhaps is another side of nowhere, and perhaps it is my favorite.

It's odd to think of how much time I spend working out a mental fallacy or problem in my head or on paper and then it's just gone. It's like a rhetorical analysis and my life is a story.

Today i was struggling a tad about spending this weekend at my boyfriend's and him not spending too much time with me. But immediately afterward, I summed that yes, he's happy to see me, but I was the one who asked to visit and he already had plans of things to do. So Though he appreciated my company, he has others things to do and enjoy as well.

This is not OUR weekend or holiday. I am just participating in it.

It was like this welling emotion of hurt suddenly was alleviated, knowing that it was not about shirking me; it was about getting things he had already endeavored to do done.

Thinking gets me to many better places than places I previously was before.

I solve a lot of my own problems staring at a screen and typing them out, or just staring and thinking in general. It gets me through issues that don't need to be issues. Its just my chemical imbalances ramping up small emotions that need not be catastrophic, but can sometimes turn to be.

Similarly, I've solved why I'm an extrovert writer. My only friends were people in stories, and though I adore human energy and potential, real human beings do not compare to the neatness and logic of story characters. They can both feel as real, but real people can change on a dime, or be growthless, or waste their time and learn nothing.

In a story we'd call that unrealistic.

So I'm content being around people, feeding off their glorious energy, but also fine not being too interactive at all times. I can hear voices in movies, I can meet people in stories. I can suffice on the people between pages, and also the people out of pages who feel strong and real and connective to me.

Thinking and reflecting is one of my strongest traits. Telling my therapist about this trait was one of the first times I realized my possible brilliance. I told her I reflect and work out problems with myself, as it was the only way I figured out how to live when things were worst, and she was stunned. She says that trait, one used to often, can sometimes be attributed to genius.

Understandably, I was also stunned.

Reflecting on reflecting even feels rejuvenating. I am so proud of this skill, the skill that kept me alive and now is helping me learn to be self-sufficient. The growth is exponential. The usability is astounding.

I feel so lucky to be able to have it.

1.) I hate that you ruined my chance to be a kid. You stole my childhood and teenage years, you know? We all it isn't like the movies, but I never even got a chance to try. You made me scream so quietly that when I couldn't shush you anymore it became like thunderclap, deafening anyone close. I  pushed people so far away that they became islands to me, and I couldn't swim. That, or I wanted them to love me so badly that I squeezed them into oblivion and suffocated them with my demons.

2.) I hate that I felt unloved because of you. I could have been loved, you know? It wasn't like I was a *****. There were boys that wanted me, even ones I wanted too. But you made me this tumultuous fire that too many lovers saw only as a sultry, exciting spark until it completely engulfed them, burning them to a crisp. I spent my young love years unloved and assuming any flaw was a cause for expulsion, and any affection was a sign of destiny. They both were neither.

3.) I hate that you made me feel lonely. You kept me in a tower, and fed me just enough so I wouldn't die. You gave me this grand craft that, previously, I could barely use except to stare at blank computer screens and wished my fingers could pour out the things in my head. You gave me this gift that kept me breathing, but also kept me lonely. If I didn't know how to write so well to myself, maybe I would have screamed enough for somebody to listen.

4.) I hate that you stole my intelligence. I might be brilliant. I couldn't even think about that, was convinced it was a fluke that I was so smart when I was little. But now that you've sorted out yourself, I can feel it re-emerging and I feel so sick knowing how much better I could have been; what I could've done. The years wasted, only able to use that brilliance to keep myself from cutting my own cord.

5.) I hate that you make me a lot to handle. You make me bubble with thoughts and words and sometimes, a lot of times, it overwhelms people. I'm a tornado, a twister, in constant, energetic motion. Not many people can keep up with me, and it makes me lonely. You made me lonely because no one wanted to stay; that or they couldn't. Its hard when a new person all the time.

6.) I hate that you made me so strong. I've been on the brink of death, destruction, ruin, pain, and yet I've always come back. For the severity of the things in my head that storm themselves around, I'm an anomaly. I spend half of an intake therapy session having to go into gory details of my inner workings, because without a record its not as easy for them to see me. Yet I never fall, no matter how much sometimes I wish I would. Guess, just like you, its in my synapses.

7.) I hate that you've alienated me from my family. They are nothing like me, and they don't understand me. Very few of them try, even less sympathize. Many call it a phase. Like my entire existence the past couple years is just a new level of the teenage rebellion I never had. I now know what kind of people they are, what kind of people they are capable of being. Their jokes and energy aren't worth the words they inflict behind closed doors. No family should question me on everything. No family should call my life a phase. No family should think the person I love most isn't worth it because they haven't met him.  No family should ask me to hide who I am because its better that way. I don't regret walking away. I regret having to.

8.) I hate that you make my relationship harder. I feel things too hard, and I know that's my issue. But it being such a core part of my system makes it hard for me to integrate files. We're learning, and growing, like we always do. I can't help but smile at how he motions just like I do. He's the only one I've ever met who keeps up with me. Everyone else I've always left behind, one way or another. Though hard, you do make my relationship stronger.

9.) I hate that I love parts of you, because they're my best parts. I'm already smart, but you make creativity a shade of bold that I can't even comprehend. Its hard to share with my peers when they stare at me like I'm an odd anomaly. You make me an anomaly, but as a writer, a creator, an artist, its remarkable. I can write about people like no one else I know can. I can write about emotional experiences I've never felt, but you've helped me see. If I can feel a glimmer, of that emotion, I can understand depths I've never felt. You've made teachers think I was abused, beaten, and much more, even when I wasn't. But I could feel it. My devotion to my art makes that pain a worth and I hate that.

10.) What I hate the most, though, is that I don't hate you. You have made me who I am. I wouldn't quit you, even if I had the choice. You make everything harder, and you make me scream, and you make me work. But you also help me be brilliant, and help me be understanding, and help me shine. You help me love and grow and breathe, even when you're crushing my lungs. Its maddening and barely makes sense, but I know that much. I know that no matter how angry, upset, shameful, any negative emotion, that behind it, that's not my strongest feeling towards you. My strongest is that you are one of my favorite things about me. I hate that people can call me crazy because of you, but I accept it because I'm my happiest crazy. I'm my happiest with you.

In a forest
My heart is a thrumming drum
in a symphony of silence.
There is peace in the trees
within the
natural beauty
of a forest in its prime.
Just the forest and I
together and loved
restful and free.

Safety amongst the foliage
has another name
too.
It crackles at my feet
watching the comradery
of the voiceless giants.
My own platoon
is none.
The forest keeps me from
being utterly
hopelessly
alone.

Everyone has enemies
No exception am I.
Mine lies behind my eyes
a friend-fearing demon
accepting only
naturally towering mutes.
Trees can't reject me
humans can.
I walk to feign fearlessness
No one needs know
I stay alone
of not strength
but
terror.

There's a place between forever and a moment, a connecting pivot between all the other wheres from which every matter molecule descends. It is a place we marvel and question and dream, and feels irrevocably natural yet so logically unnatural that there is a quaking in your very bones at that place of reverence.

Stars.

A person can gaze up at them and give them names and tell them stories but the fantastical part is no one ever knows if they are actually listening.

If you close your eyes, you can almost feel their tremendous radiance. The type of glow and beauty that over-arches all. Its fascinating, when you make your sight dark and see them in your irises, how familiar they fee when they are thousands of dead miles away. How warm their touch is when they are surrounded by fatal coldness.

Night is seen as this terrifying conundrum, where darkness brings out the fear of the unknown and the dire. Yet stars, they give a calming eminence to these fears, sliding away the layers of mortality and lifting a soul to a place where for a moment, for forever, they can feel light.

Stars are a wonder to this world. Not because we are so important, but because we are the closest mirror they have. A bright faced world of change and glow in the dark coldness of a quiet universe. We are not singular in our celestial reflections; we are a wonder to each other.

Yet stars are becoming invisible to the human eye. In a bustling city night, the sky is bloated with electric light that brings silence to the darkness, but also to the sky.

The mirrored bodies up above are being blotted by our light, forgetting their beautiful power and our collected memories and leading our humanity into an existence of singularity. The world is more populated than ever, so then why do so many people feel so painfully alone?

They are waiting, the stars, for their earth to come back to them. To shine their light in each bright eye and confess the silent loneliness they hope their humanity shares. In the deepest of their burning heart,s they don't hope for our pain, they never want that.

But they just hope so dearly to not be alone.

So in the silent night, when things are quiet and dangerous, turn off every light and take a step outside to a place where your eyes can open for the first time. Look to the sky, use your boundless power to see the moments in between, and find a star. Open your mouth, whisper the truths you didn't know you were waiting your whole life to speak. Learn the truth that your ancestors forgot when they tried to burn away all the fears of the unknown.

In the starlight, you are never alone.

Frosted lips met rusted leaves,
Surprising both parties at its rightness,
Between the freezing and the warm,
Between the snap and the crunch,
Between Autumn and Holly.

Hearts met in the mix of November,
A tossed salad of a month where both coexist,
They met with eyes of brown and blue,
And to their shock and everything else managed to meet too,
Between Autumn and Holly.

As the eons went by,
They muddled through ice ages, warm fronts,
Surviving only in the holy sanctuary of each others' arms,
And even when their battling storms came,
They came out with hands locked,
Gladiatorial victors of all things wicked their way come,
Possible love strung between them in the month of November,
Between Autumn and Holly.

The world grew below them,
and they did their work exactly as the atmosphere demands them,
They can nearly feel it in their bones when each meteorological tide must come,
It is the way their work happens,
And the way their world, our world turns,
Between Autumn and Holly.

Yet as humankind appeared and grew there was something stirring,
There were mechanisms and smoke clouds and an unbelievable flurry,
A heavy weight of some subversive demon latching itself lightly onto the lovers,
Then deeper,
But they refused to open their eyes; their earth and humanity won't either,
So the demon festered and grew to breathe noxious fire,
Eventually making the air too caustic in their ignorance,
Between Autumn and Holly.

Words could not be spoken after the inevitable occurred,
Autumn's world is near dead from a new, ferocious Holly storm,
A touch of the hand is all each heartbroken season wanted,
But they and the world stayed silent when everything's wrong,
And those fingertips and their vast love and brilliance created this hell,
A silence and death fell onto the possible love that possibly could have been forever,
Between Autumn and Holly.

Silence is their new normal,
Quid pro quo, in a way,
Holly's eyes scream her sorrow and guilt,
Her lips, on the other hand, say nothing,
Instead of their beloved, romantic November,
They now only meet for work,
The world becomes more chaotic and its weather distressed,
And the chasm between them grows larger with each atmospheric catastrophe,
The squalls screaming like their broken hearts,
All created by their ****** brilliant fingertips,
Between Autumn and Holly.

All they have left is staring down at their world and their humanity,
Hoping one day their November, their seasons, their world can be its own again,
It is too late for them to change the tides of the atmosphere,
But across the chasm they both somber and hope one day, some day, something can bridge the divide and:
Calm the atmospheric disaster,
Calm the storms,
Calm the world,
A maybe even fix the possible love that is left,
Between Autumn and Holly.

All these years I thought this was a sort of coping mechanism, a sort of way to stop myself from peeling my skin off to try to scream at it to listen. A way to keep me contained.

My words knew better than I.

When I couldn't keep my thoughts straight, my lyrical ramblings were putting away chronicles that would eventually be a bread trail to understand the world inside my head. To understand the little girl locked behind bars and being told she is a Jabberwocky. My little, trapped, fearful, left behind, bipolar girl.

Things seem so much clearer now. I haven't felt so unclouded and intelligent in years, but suddenly the paths in front of me seem so much easier than they used to be. The poisonous fog over my life has lifted and I can see the monster I was stabbing at was truly just me.

I just couldn't see that then.

I have my writing to thank for everything. I have to thank it for everything. It is the one entity in my life that has been constant and loving and keeping me human. Alive, even.

It is the music of my soul, and it amazes me every day how deeply I love it, and it loves me. I wrote an entire piece two years ago about my love for writing and how it has always stayed by me, uncertain of its love for me. Writing loves so many people, and I am just a grain of sand in writing's life. But lately I've been feeling that even a grain of sand can matter so much. I mean, Dickens and King and Miller and Lee were only grains of sand and look how much they did?

It feels stupid and forced of me to get all motivational speech here after the chronicled years of confused sufferings and endless, unsure ramblings. I'm not going to sit here and talk about how I see the light and I know the way suddenly, and my life is fixed.

My life will never be fixed. But in an imperfect world, where  nothing every truly is fixed, it seems the wading through the waters is pleasant when you do what works best for you.

What I will say, though, is that my life is finally, after years of uncertainty, one hundred percent my life, just as it should be.

I'm bipolar, it'll always make my life interesting and different than everyone else's. But if I can try to keep my life overall happy and have writing in it and feel strong and loved and brilliant, and I think for once I'll be fine.

Funny that I think this is the first time I promised that in a poem and truly believed it. Not just the moment, not just next week.

I think from now on, I can be fine.

When I was young,  school was my place. As an awkward oddity I found solace in words and reading.

Wasn't long 'til I was being called brilliant. Those days were some of the few times in my childhood life I felt strong and confident and worth something.

I was sent to an advanced school. I ate books like candy. I had a passion for knowledge and wisdom.

So what happened?

As my head got cloudier, I fell more and more behind. Well, behind for me. I was still an AP kid, so nerdy and there. But I was also quiet and, for AP, pretty average.

I stopped excelling in sciences and math as much as I used to. Everything got so much blurrier around then. As my head got more and more uncontrollable, the less brilliant I became. And the more I hated myself for it.

I could barely take time to feel everything but the raging inferno of emotions that was slowly taking over my life. I had learned to lie too well about it, so well that it was nearly my entire being by the time I finally got to stopping it.

For years I had to accept going from brilliant to average, and I accepted it as just my place. That I excelled in youth but dropped off and being good at writing would be my last, final brilliancy.

Then, nearly a decade after things began to go nuclear,  my head began to cool.

I sometimes fear how clear everything feels, how the touch of my fingertips on my keyboard still feel beautiful but in a less insatiable way. How the sky is blue and everything makes sense and how my mind craves to know more and more.

I am excelling. I am standing in front of classes that I am clearly not as qualified for and doing well. And, by god, the whole beauty of it is that doing well does not correlate to this buzzing going on in the back of my head as if its about to explode. I just feel it. This energy coursing through me that loves to know and remember and learn and do everything in my power to make everything I do wonderful. Its like magic but I know its not, its me. I didn't know "me" could be brilliant anymore. I was nearly certain "me" couldn't. I was a writer, and I was content.

But now there's this thing inside me I haven't felt in years, that has two wide eyes and wants to feel the world. Its curious and strong. I didn't think I was that strong either. I thought I just knew emotions and pretty words.

I sit here, though, and I am brilliant. It feels so arrogant and cocky to say, but I'm me again. I'm the little girl who got lost in the fire, but I thought she burned and died.

Yet as my head finally cools and the ashes fall, she reemerges and she's like some unbelievable phoenix inside my soul.

I thought I had to accept I could never be anything like the brilliant little girl that got swallowed by a monster inside of her. That I had to accept losses like I accepted losing everything I loved in my life for 18 years.

But I don't have to lose everything. I don't have to assume all that is lost is gone.

I am reading, and I am learning, and I am growing. There is this new growth in the old, weathered forests of my consciousness. It didn't have to resign to its ways, it can be anything. I can be anything.

Because finally, after years of forgetting, I am brilliant.

About that soon?





Nevermind

Funny how a poor choice in words has become a part of my reality. I have a new medicine to treat this for now too, don't worry.

There's a madness in having to learn who you are without the monster. I felt ever alone and painful when it was breaking down my door. But now without it, some days its hard to tell what my toes look like. I can't even explain the reason I fixate on toes, and how they look at feel. Perhaps because they are the only thing that keep me on the ground.

I got so good at understanding monsters and demons. Its hard to look in the mirror and understand the human that was behind the yellow eyes and ****** nails.

I feel an emptiness at night. I dunno if its because my head isn't screaming or if its because no one's here with me. Everything's just so **** blurry. I don't know as much as I wish I did.

I think I know who I am. I know the words keep me grounded and they are what's closest to my heart. But past that? it gets hard. Past the words its like I'm not I'm a person. I'm just anthropomorphic fingers across a keyboard, stringing a story together. Possibly even mine.

My eyes are so blurry.

I want to figure out this human I reside in better. I don't know her nearly as well as I should. I know the demons that possess her, but when we sit alone at a table the words that keep her sane and the monsters that keep her not are the only things that tie us together. Its hard to carry a conversation when both of those are too far out of reach.

Should I manage my time better for my writing? I already feel like I plan everything more than I should.

Should I try new things? It already feels like I have far more on my plate than I can handle.\

Should I keep forward, hoping this will pass? God knows letting things pass almost killed everything once before.

I said it too well. I don't feel grounded. Just drifting. I need to feel stable and on the ground, instead of in this floating plane of uncertainty. It feels so unknown and unsafe and makes a sick feeling overtake my stomach. It attacks best while I'm alone, while its nice, while my mind has less to distract itself from what's happening.

I want to feel right again.

I guess I just feel very left right now, and not in a great way.

Soon enough I'll be home. Well, full home. I've got 75% of it. Now just need the last bit left to feel like there's an anchor to the mortal plane.

Hunting for the human within can be a little disorienting. I just need my human, with his loving hands, to give me a tie back to the world. I've been without him far too long already.

I'm somewhere around here. Just need a little more help to find her.

Soon.

The weight of the wait is a wear that I hate to wear.

Gives great alliteration, though.

I'm so ready for all the things only a tiptoe away, but I can't have them. Nine days, I repeat religiously in my head, like a prayer from my own personal bipolar bible to keep my head on straight.

I can have everything in nine days.

Its a madness and a sort of vibration of my slumbering monster, old and weak but still ever-present, to be so close but yet so far. All my dreams are literally at my fingertips yet I cannot touch them. Not my friends, not my family, not my love, not my blue. All the things that are things of greatness are stuck at the end of this pole dangling far away and I am no good at balancing. All I get to do is stare and wait.

He's less than that ever-looming 2,000 miles away.

The blue is 30 edits and a read-through away from being possibly a completed manuscript.

The loves of my life are so close and ******* Christ I want them so bad but...

The work needs to be done. The class needs to be done. The appointments need to be done. The dishes need to be done. The unpacking needs to be done.

Their is a sense of comfort in the whole thing, that everything is so **** close, that the longest weight of my life is almost over.

I need this. I need my fingers banging against a keyboard, and I need the man I love most banging against me. Yes, I said it. Banging. So what if its gratuitous, its been over four months. I deserve the things that make me happiest. I have learned how to be alone,  I have proven my ability to be a strong individual able to take care of her ******* self.

Now, stubborn world, give me back what is mine.

The blue can come back into focus next week, and he will come not long after. Their will be a quelling of the weary weight that I have been waiting to shed.

The summer has been hard. Good on me, I toughened up quite a bit, but hard nonetheless. I know its been a little ******* everyone. But the two things I love are adamant and strong, as am I, and we'll find each other again. Just was an annoying but necessary hiatus.

My mind can breathe in its home again, on the page and keyboard, and my body can be held in the arms of the most fantastic man I've ever met. The weight of my impatience and excitably and anxiousness is heavy, but it made my body and mind so strong my adamant nature is ready to take on the world, with partner in crime and writing in hand.

I got this, no matter the weight.

I started high school with grand intentions of grand friends and grand grades and boys would only be a street-side fruit stand to glance at while I cruised on by.

Intentions never quite work the way you plan.

My first class of the day, a boy with striking blue eyes, an awkward gaunt, and floppy hair sat down next to me and started talking about Pokemon. He had seen my Pokeball pin on my backpack and had singled me out as the person to vilify him the least. I was uncomfortable and unsure, horrified by his brashness. The seat had been meant for my best friend, Cathy.

But the second his mouth opened the teen awkwardness faded from his face and he become bright exuberance. Stunned and flustered, I stared as he passionately smiled and seemed to revel in our one-sided conversation.

This happened for weeks and I eventually became comfortable enough to talk back. His smile widened as he seemed pleased to find another person who was willing to be a little weird. I didn't know nearly as much as him, but I learned because I loved to watch him beam.

Right before the homecoming dance, he asked me out with a poster that said, "I choose you! Do you want to choose me too?" I blushed and said yes, and we coordinated red for our first dance as high school freshmen.

At the dance, though, my blue eyed beamer was someone anew. He was dorky and the way he danced was flamboyant but terrifying. He often ditched me for his marching band friends, and I felt more humiliated and uncomfortable around him than the bright admiration I had felt before.

When he took me home that night, he tried to kiss me and at the last second I ducked away and gave him a hug before running inside. Those lips weren't nearly as enticing anymore when they weren't beaming at me.

The next week in class, he sat next to a different person. A guy from his science class, I heard from my friends. I shrugged and went on doodling on my notebook. At least I learned now what a Gardevoir was.

There we were, back to square one. Guess it takes more than a semi-mutual interest and a beautiful smile to maintain a relationship. And there I was, back to grand intentions and great expectations, but this time I knew things won't ever go quite exactly as you plan.

He ended up dating Cathy later, and he and I are close friends now. He's actually pretty fun when he bothers pays attention.

But this was the end of our love story.

13 years old, the back of a haunted hay-ride pick-up truck, wearing a bright yellow bee costume. He grabbed my hand like it was going to break, but my heart was whirring like a jackhammer because he had nice eyes and played guitar.

We talked shyly all day, and I remember each passing glance as we both tried to pretend we weren't looking at the other.

Evidently we pretended a little too much, because it was Katie he ended up kissing in the pumpkin patch that night. Not me.

That was the end of our love story.

Always torn between two ideals, its the crazy person way of life. Is there a way to ever rid of the issue or is coping all I have?

The fact that since my fingers can't stop typing I know I will only allow myself 30 mins of intense late night creativity and then make myself shower because showering helps me calms my twitches only shows how deep into this rabbit hole I've gone.

Average idealist me would like to think one day I could really be normal.

Crazy idealist me/pessimist me would say I would not be me and hate myself without the disorder and I will never get rid of this thing on my back.

But hell, honestly, I don't even know if this is about the **** disorder in my head right now. It might be about how long I've spent on this godforsaken planet and felt like I've impacted barely anything. I want to do things, I want to get out there and make some difference that eventually makes me feel like I am doing something worthwhile. Not just spending too much time in my day just so I can convince myself to go to sleep.

I've always hated the concept of sleep; its so much waste. We only have, if we're lucky, 100 years on this planet and we are spending at least 8 hours of each 24 hours in a day on ******* nothing? Its such a **** waste. One of the few things I truly do miss about the ******* crazy, I barely needed sleep. But now that I'm medicated and sort of relatively sane, I need the 8 hours like every dumb recharging bloke. God, I hate sleep.

I guess the less I'm around people the more I feel like I need to work my *** off to do something to impact and help and connect with others. This summer has become more and more solitary and I know, I understand nothing can always be Grace's happy fun sunshine friendship land. But for ****'s sake no wonder I was batshit when I was younger. I had even less of an impact on anything.

I need to find something.  I need to find something that connect me to people, even if indirectly. I cannot spend anymore ******* time feeling like its never enough, only to drive my *** back hard towards the crazy ledge I teeter on. I'm going to ******* burn out if I only keep on pushing. I love working towards being an author, its my biggest dream that I cannot wait to make true, but....

I might have to take a break from it to keep myself steady enough to get there. I might need to find another all consuming creative outlet to keep me from feeling like a **** idiot stuck in a box just twiddling her thumbs away. I love writing, but without people around who inspire me and make me smile its hard to keep on going when I can't get the feeling I'm bettering something. I know I am, but with every word my beloved novel feels more stale. I can't let myself hate the novel I believe could actually do some good, especially if its only cause the crazy can't take care of itself.

**** me for having to take out my biggest passion to cope with my own stupid **** head. But for a summer that gets me ahead in literally every other aspect of my life?

The love of my life just might have to take the hit.

There's never quite an end to the core of an apple, is there? You bite and you bite but you always finding yourself taking smaller and smaller bites the closer you get to the center. You know its 'cause you don't have the power or stomach to eat it all away, but you pretend its 'cause it takes time.

There's one step, two step, trip, and fall. One day you get a high and the next you hit a wall.

Getting to the seed of things isn't quite getting me nowhere, or somewhere, but someplace, the someplace I dream of, its up and its everything I want but I can't really see anymore. Darkness always makes finding the walk home a little harder.

And there's that; home. That thing I found and jumped in full-bodied and now I lay curled on the floor as it took itself three steps away. Its door is open and the welcome mat is brushed off just for me, but those three long steps are hard when your world is gone.

Its not even just the house itself. Hell yes I love it and its my someplace in a heartbeat, but Its like all the comfort and routine and dreams I had went with it and alone a girl with frazzled blonde hair and clutzy freckles is just a shaky three legged chair with a termite problem.

When you don't believe in "just deal with it" not knowing what to do can feel like ****** needle ready to give you a fix on the one day you might say yes. My eyes want to see the other doors open but all I see are padded walls and only the smallest of windows on the ceiling. It seems to be growing bigger.

I want my three legged chair to get its **** together; its all I've ever wanted. But when left isn't an option and your feet and bound and your eyes are blind what do you do?

Though I'm a ***** who ***** up funfetti cake but never will ask for a tip, my pride isn't even the matter. The matter is even if I ask I don't know if anyone can help me know what to do.

I just want every moment of these three steps to feel like an adventure; not like a punishment. But I just don't know how.

Really, I just want to get to that someplace. My someplace.

But I can't stand wallowing until I get there. I can't stand hating every moment. Its not who I am. Its not the kind of person I want to be.

I just want an open door, but every one I find here seems to be pretty closed.

I want to refuse bleakness, hopelessness, giving up. I want to be strong and dream and get everything I can out of every second. But I don't know right now if I can do anything better than settling and just dealing with that.

I don't think I could acheive all my dreams if it weren't for you, The one I never expected. I would have feebly fought for them, pined for them, but I don't think I could have gotten myself to a place where I could get them on my fingertips.

I'm going to be an author. I finished a novel, I pushed past my wandering imagination and uncertainty because you made it easier to feel my bones. To do the things that are like breathing for me.

I have a lot of worry in my heart, I always have. I worry about not being good enough or going crazy or about your safety or about the future. I don't know if I've gone madder, but on the precipice of loneliness I am not terrified. I am only wishing us both the best.

I won't see you for four months. Alone that fact makes me miss you already. But I'm not scared about it. You want to build a life with me, and you of all people don't take statements like that lightly. You may be far away but you aren't leaving.

This is a time for both of us to get ready to be the people we want to be. You get to start getting your dreams together. I'm sure as hell going to do the same thing. I cannot wait to show you with my eager little smile how far I'll come in those months. I hope I floor you. I hope you'll love me more than ever. I'm sure I'll feel that way about you.

I don't think I'll ever be that girl who feels releived or settled about being married to the well-off, wicked smart guy. If anything your intelligence makes me feel I need to keep on pushing. I want to be just as rafiant and brilliant by your side, not seem like the lucky trophy wife with the ****.

This summer will grow us. I hate to have us grow so much apart, but its how it is and we, ever adaptable and strong, will manage. I'm sure skype will be our ally.

But only with you, and I hope you feel similar with me, that we can be this grand together and have the sort of life that we could only dream of. We can have a life that neither of us never realized could be so insane and wonderful all at once without the other. I don't think I've ever been a better version of myself than I have with you. I'm stronger and I'm responsible and I'm willing to do stupid, crazy things to work towards all my hopes and dreams come true. I'm still so crazy but it doesn't matter to you. God, I ******* love you.

I cannot wait for the grand together life we will have. Only a few whiles until we get there. One summer, then some time together. Then my final semester as you get things ready in our new world and then...

Well then hopefully that grand together never needs to be forced apart again.

I was doing so well.

That's probably what makes this hurt so much. I had been pushing and pushing and exceeding everyone's expectations and doing great and...

I pushed a little too hard.

I forgot what it felt like to be burned out. Not exactly depression, though some self-loathing is swimming around in my head. No suicidal thoughts or endless tears. Just being so exhausted. Just being pushed a little too hard.

I don't even know what to write and that probably hurts the most. I love writing. I always have a thousand stories, more, dancing in my cranium and pounding inside my skull to get out. I am even thinking of some right now. But i just find it do hard to do it.

Why is that? Why do people sometimes struggle with the simple act of doing something?

I wish I had some prophetic response, but I don't. Not today. I'm lucky I've been able to get out of bed and attempt to write, let alone function normally.

I can write a bit better. My fingers can t least move and attempt to throw something out. Its just hard. That happens when you get burned out. You just need to lay for awhile and let your body do its fixing magic, even if it drives you a little mad.

The synapses can't exactly find their way back together if I keep on making them run in different directions.

I've been eroding myself. I didn't know, I couldn't feel it, but now I do. Its just this aching in my head as if it hurts to even think. I hope my brain has gotten pretty good at healing, because I'm willing to give it a couple more hours before I go stir crazy. I'll try not to erode it, but the less impatient and stressed I am the better chance I have.

I just want to be able to do everything. Why does that have to be so hard?

You see that phrase above? I always hated it. I hated it with every fiber of my being. But I could never deny that was the exact kind of living I always did.

Always convinced, even conditioned, to think people would leave. To think no one would be able to feel anything but temporary love for me. That I'd always be alone, that I'd always feel unworthy, that I'd always feel afraid.

Its weird to not be afraid.

I lived so many years of my life in fear. I had everyone leave me on and off for 18 years. I couldn't possibly fathom anyone would ever stay. Why would they? I was just broken, crazy Grace. Why would anyone really want me.

Here I am today though, not afraid.

I don't feel sane. I thought I'd need that to get here. But controlled crazy isn't so bad. I actually think I prefer it. My fingers can dance across a keyboard but also still and be human. I feel ok to be crazy when I also don't feel like its eating me away. Being eaten's always the worst part. Its much nicer to sit and have a cup of tea with it.

So yes, life isn't perfect. That's another fallacy I convinced myself of; if I stopped the crazy my life would be perfect. My head was a little funny like that. Of course things aren't perfect; family stuff is a bit messy and I have flashback moments of bad childhood feelings and I haven't been able to write much. But I'm doing well in class. I finished a novel. I have people who love me and I love them. I have the best boyfriend who I always love to see. Of course things aren't perfect. But they feel like life now instead of a painful sinkhole.

I need to read more. I need to write more. I need to publish my novel and I need to graduate. But I'm on my way and I m so happy to be somewhere. I'm not where I thought I'd be when I controlled the crazy. But there is no such thing as controlling the crazy.

Best you can do is sit right down and have a nice chat and know together that's really the best.

I don't know what to say. I went into this not knowing what to say. I know it already yet I can feel a pound in the back of my skull very upset I have no real clarifying words for the things draining my head.

Am I empty? I don't know. I hate days where I feel like I know nothing and existence is a far off concept that seems alien to me. I can stare at my hands and pick up my fingers and type but for some weird reason they don't feel like mine at all. Is my body just like the land? Everyone tries to make a claim, but it belong to nothing but mother earth. Or perhaps, in my own hapless metaphor, it means I own it? I may have written myself into a corner. Perhaps this body is really mine. Just wish I could feel it. Every touch feels so dull and odd and foreign. I don't like feeling foreign.

Nothing's really being weighing yet a can feel my back bending, the muscles sore and tender from a weight I didn't realize they bear. Are they actually feeling the imaginary weight that eats my head away or are they just so very tired too? I understand if they're tired. I'm so very tired too.

I don't want to say I'm out of my mind, though, no. Not even with the oddity that are my nerves and skin. I'd rather say out of my head; I'm not unsane and I'm not deadly I'm just tired and worn and strewn across myself in such a fashion that my favorite limbs feel so strange. Perhaps because they can still function while the rest of my feels other-
wordly.

I've lost them. There were enough words swimming in my head to send them every which way but now I seem even too tired to keep my eyes open to see them. I feel out of my head. I know it won't last, and that keeps me sane. But it doesn't make me feel whole again.

My life and my eyes look so towards the sky that it scarcely notices the calamities within. I look inside the valley but there are years of rain, and I wonder how I could drain the plains again, to stop them from being so heavy. That beautiful blue sky was so unattainable, that now as my wings float me above I look below and realize they stark horror I was blind to. It seems only once I was above it that I could really see how everything is drowning.

But how do I change anything now? I'm not apart of the place I left long ago, and I have no ability to go back. The shadows of those deep waters are something I can't even picture anymore.

Sometimes, though, if I see a bright red ribbon or a piece of glass, I'm painfully reminded of where I can't go back. The place I ran from and forgot only to awaken once again. Nobody may have blinded me and after so long my eyes are clear once more. But I almost wish I were still sightless to save myself from the horrid landscape that was previously what I called home.

I may be equipped with my strength after so many years of jumping off cliffs until I couldn't fall. Yet it still doesn't make horrible things any less horrible. It only ensures I won't jump off again and this time refuse to fly.

I know my worn, hardened heart wishes only to push all of it away, to pretend none of it happened. But I know at its core, the softened part warmed by kind hands, that its something I must face and use to grow even more.

The misery of my land and the rain and the pain are hard to bear. Its more than any person deserves to bear. But perhaps it will only make me better. Perhaps it will only make me stronger. Perhaps, after I survive this too, this time I can fly to the stars.

Its a ride, ain't it? Not just yesterday. Not just today. it will never end. Are you happy?

All the dark parts of me you hate have been exasperated by your selfish actions. Are you happy?

All the parts of me I love and am proud of you call a phase, and insist it'll be gone one day. That's exactly what I fear, and exactly what you hope. Are you happy?

The only person that makes me feel accepted and wanted just the way I am is someone you ridicule and dismiss, making me fear even more being who I am around you people. I feel that you hate me before you get to know me. Are you happy?

I always felt like a monster and in turn became a liar. My brother never feels safe to express so he is practically emotionally dead. My Grandmother showed who she was and tries to make up for her transgressions, and now is excommunicated regardless of her attempts. Everything different be something you squash and beg to hide away. Are you happy?

Now thinking of my past, my childhood only makes me sad and upset. I blocked out most of it until my head could handle it. The way you treated me wasn't acceptable. I shouldn't have been your secret, your emotional parent, your little monster. I was supposed to be a kid. That's something you can never give back to me. Are you happy?

I need space. You will feel me pulling away, and you won't be wrong. It breaks my heart but I need this. I need me. And I certainly can't spend my life cowering painfully beneath the height of my tremendous love for you or ultimately despising you for what you've done. I have to leave, at least for a little. Are you happy?

I never wanted this. I always wanted family, and I always loved you so strongly. But as I sit here and sob over the mere thought of trying to speak cheerfully about my childhood, I should not have to sob while asking myself questions. One keeps ringing in my ears. Are you happy?

I don't want to ever lose you. But I can't keep you right now either. The only way we can last is to part ways for awhile, and let me breathe and show you the things in my pocket and the heart I have grown. I can't love you when you love someone I only pretended to be. When I'm better, when you're better, then we can be a family. Then we can be happy.

I just want to relax and sleep. I want it to be comforting. I'm not exactly anxious but I'm not exactly calm. So what is up with my head.

I don't like my body much. But I don't hate it much. But I also don't know if I'll ever truly enjoy it.

I worry about writing and showing my boyfriend because last one he said was uninteresting. I'm scared of uninteresting. Was it my writing, my words, or me? He almist certainly means nothing malignant by it, but my head is still a recovering paranoia addict and writing is its worry kryptonite.

I worry on and off about my actual writing prowess. I worry more often about finding a new novel to write. If I tell everyone tht writing is like breathing to me, then why aren't I breathing more?

I'm a little stressed about this semester. Not class-load wise, but because of the wearing down in my bones I feel sometimes. I'm just doing so much. All things I love. But so much.

I'm trying not to worry about family stuff. Its not helping me and there's nothing I can really do. Its just hard.

I can see me again. That's something that's good though. In fixing myself I lost the goofy, selfless me that used to be and I am so happy to see her again.

I'm working on my abandoment problem. I think that's why bring alone bothers me so much now. Now that I have people, and I know what its like to feel like I belong, I'm so afraid of being alone and locked up in my head again. But I'm spending more spurts alone to deal with it, and I'm not dead or abandoned yet so something must be working.

I have a gorgeous sleepy boyfriend who sleeps next to me every night. That something that always makes me smile. I may be unique and fun and cute, but it still astounds me this adorkable, brilliant, funny man likes to spend his time with me. Not complaining, but with all the possible brilliant girls he knows he meets, he picks the crazy, writing obsessed dreamer who just happened to stumble upon him. I just can't believe I get to look at his face so much. His face, his mind, all of him, it just... He knocks me out.

Things are complicated. And I'm always weary and always a tad stressed and always busy. But I'm happy too. And I'm not alone; I'm out here, for far longer than just one day. I belong somewhere, and I am loved somewhere. I my still have a thousand miles to go, but I can't believe the thousand I've made it through.

Guess I'm not too shabby, even if I am Grace from Wonderland.

I can remember this moment just as clearly as if it happened an hour ago. there was this one night you texted me, long after you said you'd gone to sleep, and told me you couldn't stop thinking about me. It was early in our relationship, so it made sense, honeymoon phase and whatever. But it still makes me smile so much because it was brilliant, unromantic you staying up into the wee hours of the night thinking of crazy, turbulent me. It was ever so poignant considering how much I disliked myself then and how much I adored you.

You started messaging me with song links and lyrics, clumsily trying to explain why certain lyrics totally fit how you felt about me and only those parts. It was adorable and even now I can close my eyes and picture myself curled up and so in love with this clutzy expression of affection.

The song you kept on talking about, half drunk with exhaustion, was a song called "Always". You quirkily were insisting to ignore the parts of the songs that were negative, and just focus on the parts that talked about always thinking of me and having trouble living without me, or something. It was so late at night and so silly and so incoherent, but I can feel it. I can feel it in my bones, my blunt boyfriend getting all mushy about me.

I know we have some problems right now. I need to stop erupting and blaming my issues on you. You need to stop threatening the end of our relationship when I upset you. I need to give more focus on to bettering our relationship and myself for it. You need to open up again.

But when I can close my eyes and remember the guy who cried over the first poem of mine he read, or the one who couldn't handle seeing me so hurt when you first learned about it, and the one who's so brilliant, who's so determined, and strong, and you, I can't fathom letting that go. Letting you go.

Recently in one of my classes my teacher talked about the mystery of why writers, who sometimes don't like people very much, still talk to a lot of people. I know why I do. People fascinate me, how they think, how they act. And I think I love learning how you think the most. It fascinates me. It may not be my way, and it may not be what I think is best sometimes, but its mesmerizing watching you be you. Watching you do the things you do. Not only do you supplement my emotion-driven, wild, writing ways, but you always inspire them. You inspire me. I never feel a need to be you, but I always feel a need to be better for you, for us, and for me. I always feel a need to grow. Maybe sometimes it kicks my *** when I need to take a breath, but in the end?

I'm going places. I hope to always go places with you.

I know going back doesn't work. I know I don't exactly want me back then either. But I know with you I have moments with you, with me, with US, that always just make me stop, take a breath, and smile with how wonderful to me they look.

You're wonderful, dear. Not perfect, I will kick your cute *** before you start going there, but just right. Just what I need.

I don't really know where I'm going anymore. I just love you. I think I always will.

Always.

Never knew that word would ever make me smile instead of curl up in fear. Well, I guess that's where I'm at, love. Even when its hard. Even when I need you to alter things a bit. Even when you're frustrated with me because I'm not where you want me to be. I may not like you that second, but of course I'll still love you.

I always will.

Dear Younger Grace,

Things feel so suffocating to you, don't they? You don't quite feel it consciously, since it is so ingrained in your life. But those few moments you try to take a deep breath, you feel it. You know you're not breathing. You haven't in years, have you?

Well, years later, you can breathe, Grace. Maybe not always, but much more than you've ever felt before. And its beautiful. Its alive. Its all you ever wished breathing and living and belonging to feel. You finally have a home. It was hard, a lot of years of hard pain, but you made it. You're alive, and you're breathing.

I blamed the bipolar for all of it for a long time, you know? All of my pain and hiding and fear. What else could it have been? It always was me. It only could be my fault I was always alone. Why I thought I would always be alone, in the end.

You spent so much time feeling like the beatings of your heart were the footsteps of a monster. The way you were raised only enforced it. You existed in the world around you, but you never were apart of it. You were always locked away, as if watching from afar, never allowed a singular day as yourself out there. After all, whenever did a monster deserve to go outside?

The bipolar yes, was an interesting beast.It never helped the situation.  But the house you grew in told you that difficulty was something to hide, that it was ugly and needed to be put away. You were there to make others feel better, not you. You were their golden daughter. You were their legacy and future. People would only revile and hate you for the secrets in your head, so you had to be hidden. Weakness was impossible. You were to be stone. Ergo, the only friends who really knew you for most of your life were the silent words on your papers and the stone heart lying within your chest.

The people who raised you never wanted you. They wanted the girl they wanted you to be. That was an agent that tore you apart for years.

There it always was, in your head, this yearning to be normal and to not feel so outside. To feel like no one knew you. To feel like a human being and not this monster. But you never could free yourself in the place in which you grew, where after a short time they expected so much of you and every day you defied you felt more monstrous. The chasm between finding yourself and being what they wanted only left you monstrous, disappointing, and heartbroken. All you wanted was one single day to feel like a person. Like your own person. But it always felt like that day would never come. You were a monster; being free only hurt people.

Well, I'm here to say that's all wrong. You are not a monster, you are not ugly, and you deserve none of the ridicule you have given yourself. You were raised to believe that these emotions you were built to feel made you uncontrollable and toxic. But you are merely a woman, a human, trying to live a life they want.

You have a lot of scars, from others and yourself. You have lost many in the process. You may even lose those who raise you. But you are loved, you are strong, and you are important. And you are all of that while you are this so called monster you were convinced was in your head. You are enough as the person in your head, Grace. More than enough.

Things will be hard. They will never not be hard. But maybe it will help give you a small smile knowing that you won't just have one day out there. That foreign place where everyone else seems to live? That place you feel too unworthy and monstrous for? One day, you will live out there. And its so beautiful, Grace.

You love out there, and it is worth every ounce of torture you walked through. And what's crazier still? Out there doesn't think you're disappointing either.

Love,

A Free Grace

Today, I sat in Spanish class. We watched a cheesy soap opera made by academics to help teach us the language. It was cringe-worthy, and I was often only half-listening, having watched the majority of the soap the semester before. But then the teacher paused the story, and I looked up.

Someone raised their hand, and the first thing they said was, "What does Lo Extrana mean?"

"I miss her."

There was some sort of heavy weight in that moment, one that sat on my chest and had me staring down at the questionably drawn squirrel on my paper. I miss her

Sometime lately I have gravely understood I have to slowly pull myself away from my parents. The pain they gave me, and the expectations they have of a person I never really was, is not worth the little joy they bring. They loved me as their daughter and legacy, not as Grace.

But the heavy weight was not for them, its an acceptable ache by now. The words in my head and the weight were only from the realization that without them, there was no her.

No more slobbery kisses or sneaking into my room to see if I'm ok. No more cuddles and begging for food and long walks while singing way too loud. No more defending her against my harsh father, or giving her treats when no one was looking. It only makes it worse the fact I know she misses me.

My mother tells me she sleeps in my room now, with her head on a blanket I left behind. Every time I leave she lays sad in the closet or a bed, giving me the eyes that beg me not to leave. When I come home she runs around and jumps on me and gets so excited I ignore everything for her. But I think she knows I'm miserable there, too. She seemed to want me to walk her every time I was starting to sink lower.

I feel harsh wanting my baby puppy more than my family, but when all the world turned on me she was the one who would try to lick my tears away. And it cuts me deep to think I left her behind in a home that yells at her a little much and give her the things she needs, but not the connection she wants.

Mom and I always joked that she was the mother, but I was the best friend of that beloved dog.

And now I've left her alone, and it breaks my heart. Yet there"s nothing I can really do.

Lo Extrana.