I forgot to take my medicine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trash.

You called my items trash. So what if you find them useless? So what if even they turn out to be useless to me? You still have no right to tell me what of mine is worth it or not.

Are you saying I'm trash?

Am I too wild and crazy for you to deal with?

You see me as nothing but a child, and that burns me, cuts deep, whatever metaphor of pain you want to use in this awful discussion. You look at me and see irresponsibility, but what actually it is, is difference. I am different than you. I know you don't normally have to deal with people who don't think like you do, correction, you don't normally like dealing with people, but you chose to deal with me.

If you can't simply accept me for who I am, as other friends have done before you, then I guess its time for you to go.

I began this blaming myself, kicking myself, for ******* up yet again. Always the ****-up, that Grace. But you know what? I'm getting my **** together the best way I can, and if you don't like how I function, then that *****.

I can't deal with people who can't accept me. Not right now, actually, thinking about it, not ever, really.

I have to be me right now. There is no other way, and if you cannot accept that, then I guess I cannot accept you.

Leave the undesirable and go live elsewhere.

I hate to sleep.

The monsters and demons and sins and wraiths run rampant in my mind, and my control is lost. Control is key. Every impulse, every little tiny thought, leads me closer to madness. Slumber is madness creeping in upon me when I cannot steal myself from it.

Late to bed, and early to rise, leaves the insanity hidden until the day she dies.

The walking, the talking, the revealing of my truest thoughts occur when in slumber, and I hate it. That's why I don't sleep, that's why I'm last, always last, because I know that's when the crazy comes to play.

Lust, Gluttony, Vanity, Envy, Wrath, Greed, Sloth. All seven swirl in my veins, with a chesire smile concealing the truth of them. They swirl in all veins, they play their devil games in the night for everyone, but for me, its different. It always will be.

Seven little friends swimming in my head, begging me to become someone I am not. I'm not in love, but the *** is good. The mirror is a comrade in arms. The green of my eyes is for more than just genetics. The fat on my legs has a secret agenda. I feel the sickness of anger in my heart but it never shows. My selfish wiles are secret, but they are there, always screaming. And when boredom creeps, I let the angels weep.

I hate slumber, for all seven play their seductive little games inside the holes in my head, and I can never be free of it. I fear who I am when I sleep, for its not the face I know.

But with you, I slept.

That astounds me.

He says he's a **** up. That his heart is the one that sways, that he fears shattering my heart.

He doesn't know, he doesn't understand.

I'm  not trying to say he's perfect, but he does not realize how awful my attention is. The focus flips and twists and turns and he doesn't realize that on a dime I could change my mind. Then I'd be the ****-up.

Commitment is not my strong suit. He deserves so much better than me, but he doesn't know it yet. Not until I turn around and say I forgot and that nothing means a thing anymore. I want to be different, I do, but I don't know if I can. Because one week away from him and the thoughts are already rushing in.

I'm already trying to find something wrong, something to **** us.

**** Up. I want him to **** up so I can free myself. I am a **** up for refusing to stay with a man I love. **** up everything for selfish reasons, trying to find ways out just because I get distracted too easily.

I have never cheated, and I never will, but I will ruin something great for a maybe. **** maybes. **** the fact I cannot stay committed to one person. Maybe that's why I was so afraid he wasn't committed, because I'm not.

I want to be good to him. But I don't know if I can.

I'm the real **** up.

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.

Funny when your own head is a double edged blade, huh?

I seem to find the imperfection of days to be the most beautiful. The goofy moments, the little mistakes, the figuring things out, the unexpected.

But those same moments sometimes lead me to the nights where I lay down with a little chip on my heart and concede, "Not all days will be beautiful."

I'm happier. I'm stabler. I must concede things are better.

So why can I not concede that I will never be perfect?

These days I end like this sometimes hurt much more than the ones I give up on. These are the days I did all I could and just accept defeat at the end of the day, knowing every day isn't perfect.

Why am I such a starving perfectionist that even stability cannot sate me?

I hate myself when I do this. When I keep on pushing and pushing my own mental ability until I crack. If I push harder the stability of my mental wall will not strengthen. It will only crumble all the faster.

I am never satisfied. I am selfish. I am wrong. There's this darker side to this pure, bubbly girl I show the world. The monster side. The side that I can never be pleased with, and the side that makes sure I can never be pleased with anything else.

I know this is one imperfect day with one imperfect night. But its hard not to be scared that this is a descent into darkness once more. I'm so scared of the dark by now. Please don't make me go back for too long.

This day has been long and disappointing and imperfect. But I just wish I could hate it a little less.

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.

I spend a lot of time worrying about what other people dream, what they want from life, and making it happen. I always try to play roles, like the good student, or the sweet daughter, or the funny niece, or the counseling friend, or the reliable sister. But what do I want? What do I dream?

For a long while it was three simple things. Kids, animals, writing, and I never questioned or developed any of it. I mean, I had a relative idea of dates or amounts of kids, and relative writing ideas, and relative animal ideas, but nothing solid.

But today, though it may be f little interest to anyone else, I'm going to flesh out my dreams. I owe it to myself.

I want to publish a novel. Particularly a social commentary. Particularly something important to me, like mental health, the environment, relationships, family, etc. And particularly something that people may like one day. I'd love to have a novel that people know. It would be really special.

I want to have kids. At least one, preferably two, livable three, pray to god no more. And you know what, I'll love any kids I have, but I really want a girl. I want a little ball of crazy who can be a pirate or a princess and follow me around and call me mommy and cuddle on my lap and let me read her stories and be my baby girl. Maybe I'm crazy superficial, but the cake topper for me would be the ability to name her Alice. My little hero of Wonderland. I mean, the white picket fence dream is to have one boy, one girl, but I guess we'll see. If I get no girls, I'll name something else Alice. If I get two girls, I better pick one super meaningful name for her, because only one is not fair.

I want to see Africa. The animals there have always been my favorites, and I feel they're just so wild and crazy and different. There are deserts, forests, savannas, lions, zebras, okapis, all of it! Its always just seemed so wonderful to me and I've always wanted to see it in person.

I want to take my kids to Disney World. I want them to feel the wonder I felt as a kid, and fall in love with the magic I loved as a kid and even now. Maybe like I fell in love with Wonderland and various other worlds Disney created, maybe they can find their own worlds that resonate with them and make them feel safe.

I want to find or build a house for my family and decorate with love. I have art skills, I can decorate everywhere. Disney rooms, book rooms, video game rooms, all of it. I just want our hearts to be strewn across the walls and be a place of comfort for them.

I want to get married to a man I am madly in love with. Obviously, I think right now I'm with a man I could easily love the rest of my life. I wish with every fiber of my being that the home I dream of, the kids I want, the books all over, can all be things I have with him. But I won't make promises to myself that I don't know what will happen. God knows that in this second I want no one else, but I cannot force myself on the person I will be in the next twenty years. I can only dream all of this will be with him.

I want to create art. Not atypical art, with paint or pencil, but with crafts and words. They are beautiful pictures that I'm good at making, and I'd like to not only make them for family and loved ones, but maybe one day sell them and do more than just be that ever-writing author stuck in their study. Maybe I'm crazy, whatever, but I want it all.

I want to graduate college. Not only because I'm already in it, and I will enjoy the time I have, but I do want it over with as well. I know everyone's going to yell at me and say shut up they are the best days of your lives, but people said that about high school too. I enjoyed my time, but I look forward to today and tomorrow much more than I enjoy looking back. I want to graduate and have a lovely time at college, but I also don't want to spend forever here. I want to learn what I can, make friends for life, make connections, and then start the rest of my life. Start being a professional writer.

I want to start keeping an open dialogue with my audience, not just here, but on other social medias, so there is a connection even before I publish my first book or the ones to follow. I want to be an approachable author. I want to seem human, not like some unattainable, far away thing for young authors to look at. I want to be real.

I want to publish a poetry book. Obviously I'll wait another year or two, and compile the best ones, but i think it could be fun. See me write novels? Well see me write short things too. I know most authors/writers pick a niche, but after years of trying to find mine, I don't think I want one. I just want what I want.

I want to write a memoir. Though I use a pseudonym, one day I want to grow the confidence and strength to write as me, and tell people not just the stories that go on in my head, but the stories that are going on in my life. Hell, maybe I'll call it something cheesy like "The Girl Behind Grace" or something super cheesy like that haha

I want to start a bipolar group wherever I raise my kids. I mean, I'm sure with the way I am and how the person I'm with is, we'll have quite a few years of adventure. A lot of years. But I will put my foot down and say for the sake of kids we need to settle, at least for a good twenty years. I want to be a leader and help others like me where I live, i want to help people feel better. This life isn't easy, and we deserve help and a group and a community just as much as any book club.

I want to work on my baking/cooking chops. I want to be so awesome at baking and cooking that all the kids want to come to my house for dinner and I can make my kids their own badass birthday cakes. Maybe even make cakes for friends and neighbors for a bit of money. It will be awesome.

I want to visit my family at least once a year. I know that may not work out, but I don't want to lose them in all my crazy life that I plan. They may be out there and need help but I do love them, and I want my kids to have a good sense that they have a huge family that loves them so much.

I want pets. Crazy pets. Turtles and dogs and pigs. Those are the ones I really want. Dream world says one turtle, one pig, two dogs. It'll be absolutely crazy cool. What kid gets to go to school and say they have a pet pig? my kids.

I want a garden. I'll work on fleshing out that idea. I just want to be outside more. I love outside.

I want to fall in love with my life more and more every day. I want to have fun with my family. I want to play video games, a write like a madwoman, and be a good mom, and take care of myself, and make my home and life beautiful. I want everything to be worth it at the end of the day, even when not all things are ok.

I want a lot, I know, but a girl can dream, right?

It came back.

It was gone for so long and I had straightened up everything and things were actually even better, and the second my back was turned too long, there it was. The Jabberwocky.

I knew the second I saw it how it had gotten in. I had been in the front, tending to my new garden that I had acquired, with beautiful roses all about. I had never been so happy. And while I turned away, and left my back door open to tend to the outside, it came in and ate all my reserves and made itself at home again.

Unlike before, though, when I went inside it didn’t coax me into letting it stay, letting it swallow me whole. It began to shriek at me and attack me and I was so scared and I kept on telling it to go away, that I didn’t want it anymore but it stayed and fought and chased me through the house, wrecking all the scars I had repaired and pretty new things I had put up since its last visit. It wasn’t until I let it scratch my legs that it listened to my desperate, hollow pleas. It went away, slinking back into the darkness it came from.

I stayed up in my room for a while, tending to my small wounds and thanking God, Gods, anyone for letting me live. I looked around and cuddled into my bed and thought it wasn’t so bad. I smiled and even laughed a little bit. No, the Jabberwocky could not get me now. Things were different. It knew I didn’t want it, that’s why it fought. That’s why it lost.

But eventually, as I finally descended back into the rest of my home, I saw the damage it had caused. The stairway was scarred and scratched, the living room was a terror, and the kitchen worse. It had left me bare, empty, raw once more. I had been careless, reckless, stupid. What had made me think it wouldn’t come back again?

I started to clean, to paint, to polish, trying to rid my house of any of its signature marks. Maybe not fully, leave reminders for myself of its danger, but tidy enough no one could tell just by looking at it. Everything was a dandy cleanup, until I saw my legs again. The Jabberwocky may not have destroyed me, but I had given it something. I had let it have a part of me.

The rage started to build. I had left the door open, I hadn’t made letting the Jabberwocky in a non-option. I had let myself flirt with its darkness a little bit every once in a while, letting it think it was welcome. I had let it scratch me instead of telling it to get out more forcefully, instead of pushing it and fighting it harder. I had given it a token, a present, to make it leave me alone. That only teaches any good monster to come back for more. I had made the mistake, I had made the choice, I had ****** up. I, I, I am selfish, stupid, wrong. It wasn’t long before I was screaming.

My rage was so strong as I angrily cleaned my house that the Bandersnatch caught the scent and almost stopped by. Bandersnatches convince you to take the fire out on those you love, at any drop of a hat. They play practical jokes that benefit them and them alone, laughing their souls off while you alienate yourself. They were good friends of Jabberwockys.

But when I saw it near my back fence, I silenced.

No. No more. I didn’t want any more monsters, not after how long I hid them in my basement and held them in my heart. They weren’t allowed here. This wasn’t their home. It was mine.

So I locked the back door, and closed the front gate, and bolted the first door, and never stayed up too late. When they barged in for my head I was at no fault, and had every right to call for help, but when I let them waltz right in like an old friend I had some blame in my heart. But those monsters of Wonderland, I had never loved. I had merely no memory of a life without them. Now that there is a fence and a door and they’re not allowed anymore, I must do all I can to keep them away. They don’t deserve my heart, nor my head. Though I am a person of Wonderland, I don’t deserve to be dead.

One moment.

Her eyes were closed and the sparks danced behind them and down through her body, a beautiful, uncontrollable choreography. The smell of leather and summer intoxicated her, left her knees wobbling. One moment, one memory, lips parted and together, spinning her round and round until she fell down.

Blue eyes begged and fingers scraped noncommittally against every pore, but she was locked. The wood would not budge, and her silent tears collapsed as he danced from afar. A bittersweet tango as another woman reflected in his eyes, fingers dancing with his as hers once did.

Cheap motels and motor oil were all they had needed that summer. He had smiled and left kissing promises in the naked morning, waking her daily with their future, fantasy, and love. One moment, every stalling second was one moment, one moment before he could kiss her, one moment before he could touch her, one moment before he could love her.

She would wait moment, she would wait forever.

Together their hearts had melded into a rhythm unlike any she had known, music without sound that had them dancing from the moment they met until the moment she had to leave.

One moment. They said that moment would ruin his life. Every leaping dream and twirling hope would be crushed by her little mistake. His dance would end. Each hand hung onto a different love, and she had to choose.

Long moments, on one long night, she wished sorrowful goodbyes to her growing love. In the shadows she crawled to clinics cold and heartless. Her fingers dropped money in their pockets to tear her heart open, rip it to shreds, take it way and make her cold, clinical, incomplete. She could no longer dance, her fingers could no longer move with his as they once did. Yet their hearts stayed tied, and with each misstep her love took three. Clueless, he let her ****** his music, his rhythm, his dance with love.

They told her she was killing him. They insisted she was no good for him. They blamed her when he could no longer dance.

She listened.

One moment, arms clasped onto one another, water fell in a remorseful decrescendo, marking the end of a love. The cavity of her heart was filled with rainwater, flooded with the pain of their loss. He begged her not to go, but he was blind to the blood on her hands. She had to be strong to save him.

One final moment, lips crashed into the final dance, the beautiful memory that haunted her into her dreams, into her days, unto her end.

He smiled, she smiled, and his dance finally began again in the arms of his bride. All that was left for her was a silent solo, the walk away from the love she would never replace. They had locked her out. They had broken her heart.

But they had been right, and without her he would dance again.

My eyes hurt after I cry. Every time. Did you know that?

Its like my head is telling me to close them, and maybe I won't see the blood strewn across my childhood walls, my childhood hands, anymore. Their assailants were little secret cuts made each day, desperate to ask for help.

Years after they stopped, my eyes can still see them. My walls talk to my head and remind me how many times I wished I were dead. And I don't feel them, I can't fathom them, but they eat at the frays of my sanity, the few weak threads, and start tearing the life I've put together for myself apart. Who am I? I can't tell if I'm a death-lusting 15 year old or a stable and happy 20 year old woman. My eyes get so blurry here.

Its so hard with this picturing mind, to not remember how picture perfect we could be sometimes. I forget the calling and crying and cutting for those little snapshots that make me think I ruined all of it. That its my fault we're not picturesque enough to send perfect post cards for Christmas anymore. Its hard to convince myself it was never that way in the first place.

I mean, cmon, Grace, open those burning eyes of yours. You've felt like an outsider since you were young. Your father joked that with your starlight hair and sky eyes you were an alien that they adopted one day, but the odd part is you kind of understood why it could be true. Not just because of the celestial features, but you never belonged. The daughter they wanted and made you to believe you needed to be was never you. You walked on glass shards of your own shattered heart to try to reach the strange plain where your parents resided, but the more you bled the further you felt.

But they lied, you're their flesh and blood, that part can't be undone. They gave you special recessive genes to a T and made you suffer as a child for having them. To top it all off they gave you this ****** photographic memory that traumatizes you too well. Its like you can never leave the blood behind.

Yet tonight your eyes hurt, even too much to picture the blood, so maybe its time for some rest. The memories, the blood, even they can wait. For now what you need, god forbid you admit this, is some silence and rest. There has been enough clatter between your ears for one night. Who knows, some people might not even be able to withstand such clatter and chatter for a lifetime.

Guess your just a special recessive alien like that.

Like always, Grace never can get it straight, as the girl from wonderland wonders if wondering is her fate. But here she is quoting love songs as if she truly understands them. For once, maybe she does. There’s a swelling in her chest and butterflies in her head and everything is all cabobbled in a cacophonous mess that she cannot comprehend.

The furthest distance she’s ever known was her head to her heart, they never seemed to work in tandem. One would act, another would scold, making her wary to be impulsive when it came to love. She had been hurt more times than she could count, and that unfathomable account made her fearful. From her head to her heart, it seemed like she was doomed to always run away.

Then you came along.

No doubt, the poor girl wanted to run the second she felt a hint of emotion towards you. There was many a time she could feel her heart starting to turn, starting to flee, away from everything she had ever been frightened by and all the love in her heart that had been rejected.

You scared her.

She looked into your eyes and knew your logical head and stubborn heart were things she could fall for, things so very unlike her that she could admire them, want them, love them. Between her flittering heart and emotional mind, she needed someone like you, and she knew it. But she also knew you could break her, and she could break you, and breaking had been done enough through years of falling through windowpanes.

For a good while, she resisted you. She tried not falling for you, she tried to not make it serious. Yet then you looked into her eyes hundreds of miles away and told her to not be afraid to fall for you. And what did she do that second?

Well, that scared little girl fell. She fell hard.

Ever since the age of four she was always a strong young woman externally, while her innards were stunted to that scared little girl who never could let go. It broke her, melted her, molded her into the woman you love today. Or girl. Depends on the day.

Beware, for you hold that scared little girl in your hands. She no longer holds that part of herself internally; it and her heart are now yours. You dared her to fall; she did. You begged with your eyes for her to stay; she did. You smiled and tricked her into those three terrifying words; I love you. But your daring and begging and tricking are things she does not abhor you for, rather, she loves you more because of it. Because only a lovable thief could steal such an iron locked heart.

There it is, master burglar. She loves you deeply and you have caught your prize, the safeguarded heart that many before thought they could lock pick. Never knew kicking down the door was an option, but you made it one.

So what are you going to do with it? I pray you hold it close to your ear, hear her whisper her love over and over again, hold it close to your mind, feel her feel the deepest way you will ever feel, and hold it so close to your own heart that you can acknowledge they share beats. Goodness knows she’s known for some time.

As you fall asleep before her, like you do every night, I hope your subconscious can feel her kiss your cheek and her confidently terrified voice say how much she loves you. She’d name the stars after your eyes but your eyes are too loving to be so far away. And even when the waters get rough, and the seas get salty, and the games get brutal, think of that occasional nighttime ritual you never knew about and hear her whisper silently,

*I love you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For you only.

Insert possible Trigger Warning for my fuckity bluntness today*

God knows if you've read a lot of my work, you know I am all about the metaphors and symbolism and all of that, right? I twist everything into run on sentences of Wonderland madness and all of that.

Well, today, **** that.

You heard me. **** my words and my poetry, today we are being blunt, as blunt as a person who feels uncomfortable at the mere mention of some words when she's feeling down. But this isn't about me right now. Well it is, but not. Anyway, here we go.

You know what ******* *****?

Suicidal thoughts. And thoughts of cutting. And insane impulses. And moving vehicles and how nice it sounds to jump in front of one sometimes, even if its simply because you want to know what it feels like.

I lie a lot, ok? I am probably able to be diagnosed as a pathological liar at this point, if we want to be ******* honest for once, because I am so scared of terrifying people and hurting them and making them feel bad that I keep the truth inside. I tell snippets or water-downed versions, but I literally want to bash my skull in half the time from unwanted impulses or put myself in a straight-jacket for how nice causing myself pain sounds. Its crazy, I know its crazy, but its my head and its me and that's a hard thing to live with when saying 'I'm not like the other girls' stops being a fashion statement and turns into a curse.

Impulses and impulsiveness in general is not ******* cute, ok? I look at a car and I want to run into it. I see any attractive person and I wonder what it would be like to flirt and kiss and see their body naked. I see a train and wonder what it would be like to run away. I finish a book and I want to publish and quit school and be a full time author with half a writing degree. I see a knife and I wonder what it'd be like to stab someone with it. I am not suicidal or nymphomaniac or a murderer, and I don't truly want to do any of these, but the ******* impulses. In that moment its the only thing that sounds like a good idea, and I feel my body pull towards it. Just one step into the street, just a few hours of running away, just a little cut. I all ******* sick and I know it but its my head and though I control them better now I can't stop them.

I can't change people either. And because of my fuckity condition of moods and impulses if I get sad and get a suicidal impulse, it latches on like a *****. And I want it to stop and I want to feel better and I want help, but how do you tell your friends that the one little sentence they said turned you into a death-seeking mess?

I'm broken, and I'm ******* hella crazy, but I still want to be human. I want to be treated like I'm a person and not a ticking time bomb. I hate telling people anything going on in my head because I don't want to be treated like I'm some invalid. I am valid, I am real, and I don't deserve to be treated like a monster when I never do anything, I just have these ******* impulses.

****, ****, ****, **** impulses.

I hate impulses.

I am fully aware I'd feel empty without my range of emotion, but can the impulses go away, please? I don't want to even contemplate cheating on my boyfriend when its nothing that I want, I don't want to be afraid the impulses might get me to jump off the nearest bridge, and I don't want to cut my wrists.

I am fully aware people can't always get what they want, but why the hell do I have to fight a raging hell-monster that whispers all the things no one should do? Why do I get that special ******* pleasure? If this is some sort of 'gift' to make me stronger, guess what? I. Don't. Want. It.

I just want to be a normal quirky girl who's a little emotional and likes to write stories. Why is that such a hard dream?

And by the way?

I still ******* hate impulses.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

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

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

What am I using?

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

But back to where I was. You.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, I love you.

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

I didn't know I'd end up here again, especially so quickly after crashing.

But yet again, my heart is an unexpected, fickle thing.

My hair is *****, just like my hands, for I have as much pain and blood on my fingertips as has been inflected upon my heart. Funny how a small little girl from Wonderland can cause so much pain. Innocence was once on my lips, but then the world killed my brother, and then the Jabberwocky came to play.

But where are my manners? Let me invite you to tea, buy you your last meal before I ravage your body with my teeth and claws and words and terrify you when my green eyes before blood-red with the splattering of you. I hate to make people forgettable, so trust me, it'll be a night to remember.

The demons inside come out to play at night, when my defenses are weak, talking of death so easily, when I know I don't have a heart for killing. I only have a heart for destruction and dismemberment of hearts and minds, not lives.

Grace was once so little and pure and kind, but the second blood red graced her sibling's lips, it was over. The monster had come to reside in her.

Red, green, the colors of my heart. Funnily enough, also the colors of Christmas. Didn't know generosity would share the same colors as my envious, greedy, ****** heart.

I am not a fan of myself in the darkness. Perhaps because I see in the nothing a reflection of my own shadows.

Go to bed, dear Grace, before the monster inside eats you. **** you, Jabberwocky, and all your tricks. No one comes back from Wonderland without a tad bit of baggage.

Don't beware the darkness, beware thyself.

Goodnight.

Bite me.
Could I be ******, turned on, or something else entirely?
No seriously, c'mon, Bite Me.
I dare you.
Those three little words are quite powerful, aren't they?
You want to touch me, to **** me, to have your teeth on my flesh and just take my orders and defy them all at once.
There's a fire's touch in your blood, and its burning you up right now.
I'm a woman, yes, but you won't hurt me.
Try to hurt me.
Maybe I'll like it.
Maybe I'll be like society, kicking at your *****, screaming at the top of my lungs for you to Man Up and teach me a right proper lesson.
Well, shouldn't you?
BITE ME.
Not a vampire bite, too pop culture for its own good, or a little teasing bite, no, I want you to hurt me.
Aren't you a man?
Doesn't that mean I deserve what I get?
Doesn't it mean I want it?
I always want it, I'm a woman after all.
So c'mon, big boy, Bite Me. Make me remember where I "belong".
Maybe I'll be nice enough to make you a sandwich afterwards while I cry my eyes out.
You crane your neck, you open your mouth, and I let out a bittersweet sigh.
You bite me.
And like a woman, I took it. I took it all.

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 took my meds today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to fly and forget it all.

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 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.

Eyes haunt me in the dark of the night.

Eyes I want, eyes that watch me in the waking hours and eyes endlessly open to the idea of a silly theory entitled me.

Eyes that sparkle when they see my face, wanted and held once more, eyes so new yet eyes I feel I've tied around my heart for a thousand years.

Poetic words lead my lips astray, darkening the colors of a blossoming attraction into the gray undertones of possible love, fantasizing too much and trying too little.

Lips I know he looks and at wonders how they’d feel painted across his soul, my warm touch against his and a dance I have long forgotten strewn across the bedroom.

   Fingers grasp at mine from all directions, yet his are the ones I find in the fray.

I hold tight, wanting so badly for the future, savoring so heavenly the present.

Disjoint, we are so new, but the possibilities of a condescending maybe are too strong for once for me to dismiss.

Maybe. Maybe is the only word I need to live off, a maybe for him, for his eyes, for his lips, for his fingers entwined with mine.

  All I need is maybe for my heart to fly.

My green eyes stare into the crowd of my memories, pinpointing all the moments in which I realized I wasn't good enough. I look at others' pasts and want their, want their histories to be my own, so the pain can be expelled from my memories and only happiness remain, but I am not bandit of time, I cannot take what isn't mine. I can only accept what is left behind.

Her red hair, my red heart, the red wrath I feel in my soul at the clarity I feel knowing that all these moments, these flaring flames in my life-fire, have led me to believe the one thing no young woman should never believe; I will never be good enough.

Broken glass in a broken pane, I lay shattered by each fist pounded into my face. I spent years reflecting others, putting their image before mine, only to get smashed and bashed and banished to the planes of Asphodel, left to die in my own misery. Left to my own devices and own lax, to give up and to give out never to receive again, and let myself fall into the darkness.

Yet I fought, in the worst way I could. Smiles lie and words hide, as the demon below lay his puppet hands on my heart, and even when my soul screamed for freedom with tears most needed, I let my pride champion over my sanity. Bottle up the pirate ship, Grace, it'll look so pretty on your shelf, and look out of place in your heart. Remember, you're no thief.

I hoarded the good times and the love in my heart like Smaug, the great and terrible, solidifying my body as a Lonely Mountain with a maddening crystal at its core. Maybe its only fitting I am short in stature, for I have dragon madness upon my heart, set like a promise to myself that the bottle on the shelf? it will never open, and I will never let the stone walls of my smile fall. This mountain was my domain, and no one was going to destroy it.

Until they did. I was a glutton and I ate and ate the hearts of others until it came back upon me, like a righteous knight set on showing me the error of my monstrous ways. They cut me down, and broke through my glass and forced open that bottle until I could hide no more. The dragon with the stoic walls and pretty smile was revealed, and it drove people away.

Desperate for love, affection was sought in the worst way possible. Body sold for attention and affection, the defeated dragon, the broken glass, the faulted whatever I was was left open and unable to find solace. The window into the mountain was burst open and there was no going back. Fear, pity, worry emanated from those left in my life. But I was reckless, and I no longer cared for this vessel that held m demon soul. I simply wanted the pain to go away.

Then someone dared enter my keep, and hear my whispers, the weak ones, the only ones my heart dare still speak, and they whispered back, "You are always good enough'.

And that was when everything changed.

So you're asleep.

I hope its a beautiful sleep, with all you could ever dream of, for because of you and my endless stubbornness I have exactly that. I have you, I have my friends, I'm doing what I want, and I have happiness.

Sometimes I truly wonder if I'll wake up and all this wonder will have just been a dream. The best dream I've ever had, a dream which I don't want to end, a dream I'd cherish, but a dream nonetheless. Could you be real? Am I really holding your hand close to my heart or is it just air I hold as I slumber, only to wake from this magnificent dream I am learning to love.

I love my life.

That is something I rarely have been able to boast in past years. Between diagnoses and ruined relationships and crashing and burning and all of it, its been hard to love the hand I've been given. But with time I am learning to love life, love me, something I never thought would occur.

I hope you sleep well, and my typing does not bother you. I hate to bother, even though I know little I do truly bothers you. You take my bad and my ugly and care for it and I've rarely had someone do that.

I miss my dormouse and my white rabbit, but you, the one I never expected, are making sure the hole in my heart does not consume me.

I'm going to sleep soon, hopefully to wake by your side again and feel cared for and wanted. You're all I've ever wanted, even though I never knew what I wanted, and  I cannot fathom the person I am right now without you.

Sleep and dream, and I hope no matter how wonderful the dream is, you'll still want to come back to me.

Goodnight, for now, without fear, I sleep.

This isn't really a poem. Or it is. I'm not sure. Its something.

I'm tired and after this poem will go to bed. I need bed. Everything is so complicated. Life is so complicated.

Love is complicated.

Please shut up romantic twits, including me. Not just romance. All love.

I don't reach out to friends enough. This is my fault.

My friends don't reach out to me enough. This is their fault.

I should call my family more. That's a simple fact.

And yesterday I was constantly spewing internally about how perfect my boyfriend is. I mean, he's pretty great, but not perfect. No one is. He's perfect when it counts, and that's what matters. And he loves me. A lot.

I'm listening to sad love songs. I have no clue why. I felt compelled, even though I have nothing to be sad about really. Nothing is wrong, or at least I don't think. Is there?

I don't know with my head.

Its turns and winds and an endless staircase of confusion. Its Wonderland. Its a mess. Some days its crazily planning way ahead into the future, some days it can't even plan the next five minutes.

I mean what's nice is lately it tends to plan things with my boyfriend, but I digress.

My back hurts. My knee hurts. I'm tired.

I want magical important words to spew from my fingertips right now but i simply cannot find them. My heart is broken. I'm rejecting even the words' love. The end's beginning. Or the beginning is ending. I know nothing right now.

My head is cloudy, my eyes are heavy, but I feel there's more. That there's something important right behind my eyelids and I need to dig it out before I fall asleep. Should I get some knives, a scalpel, carve it out for my sanity's sake?

I was here.

I guess that matters. I tried. But ******, sometimes trying isn't enough. My boyfriend likes to say, there is no try, only do and do not. And i want to do. I  love to do things. Sometimes they just don't do.

Homework titles swarm my head. Broken Glass. Change. For Writing. Fat is not a Fairytale. Human.

Guess even the stories that have nothing to do with me have my heart in them. So why is my heart eluding me now, when I feel like I might need it most? I'm blowing this out of proportion. I do that. Someone once told me I feel too much for attention. Maybe I do.

Another said I didn't know true depression. One said if he can make himself will himself to be better I have no excuse. Several said I was selfish and a tiring person to be around, because I made everyone walk on eggshells. Because I was a burden. Maybe they're right. Maybe I've been stubborn and fooling myself this entire time. Maybe its all my fault.

I've been blaming genetics and events but ****, maybe the answer is attached to the brain I find so unruly. Maybe its me.

The people who surround me now make me think otherwise, but what if they turn out just the same. What if I **** up everyone I touch. What if I turn them all away. Life can do terrible things to people, you know.

If they want to leave, its ok. I'll remember them though. I remember everyone who leaves. They leave pretty scars on my heart that I like to count late at night, like battle wounds proving myself that maybe I'm strong, maybe I'm not what they say.

But who knows, according to them its all my fault.

Who knows anymore. I like to think I'm human, but after years of being told you're a monster, its pretty hard, right?

Makes sense that I get so close, so broken by those words. I am deformed, and I am ugly, and those are crimes for which the world shows little pity. I am a monster, only a monster, and I must obey and stay in here.

I put up a pretty front but eventually someone gets in. Maybe its brave of me, or stupid. They come in and they promise they see me and will not turn away, but they always do. They always defend me, but put me aside. They never pick me. A face as hideous as my face was never meant for heaven's light.

But then an angel smiled at me, and kissed my cheek without a trace of fright. I dare to dream that he might even stay for me, I swear it must be heaven's light.

But in the nights, when I'm alone with my thoughts, I'm so afraid that I'll push him away. That he won't stay, that I won't be enough, that he'll turn astray because I'm too broken.

But then I look at him and I realize though I loved those before, they have never been him. He is kind and understanding and makes me smile and makes me completely forget I am a monster. Maybe with him I'm not. Its beautiful and terrifying, because I know I love him, and i could love him forever. But if I push him away, if I ruin this too, If I can't love him then who?

I've never believed in soulmates, I always thought it was stupid and silly and still kind of do. But if that stupid, silly thing exists, I'd be almost convinced he was mine. Hell, three months in and we were talking about kids and love and nothing about it felt forced or too early. I was worried because of what others would think, how everyone else would find it rushed and crazy. But I guess we are crazy.

I'm crying out of joy and sadness and fear and all of it right now and I can't keep it straight.

I always thought home was back where my extended family was, where I was born and ripped from when I was young. And its still one of my homes. I was for years desperate to go back, but I found my college to be home too. My friends, my freedom, my life is there.

But the best home I've ever discovered is the one I have when I'm with him. I would follow his crazy, ******* to the ends of the earth.

I just want to be home. With him and at college. I love my family, but this isn't my place. This isn't where I belong.

I almost died here, literally. I'm ready to go back to living.

My joints all hurt. The night is threatening me, and my body is succumbing. But the ramblings were nice. They were reflective. They were something. They were complicated. They were love. They were me. They were you.

They were a snapshot of life.

Things aren't even bad. I really shouldn't even be freaking out. The papers are sorted and the kids are alright, but I know its incoming and I don't know what to do.

You see, I hate my birthday.

It gives my family another opportunity to disappoint and show that they don't understand me for one more consecutive year. I'd rather they send a simple note that they love me instead of things I'd never need nor want.

And the friends. Even my best of friends, or at least those who I thought were, can utterly wreck my birthday. Last year, my roommate moved out and barely anyone spent time with me. Every birthday party when I was young i spent at least some part of it crying. And when I stopped celebrating them, my friends would get me passive aggressive presents like getting me journals when they felt I needed to deal with myself more and talk to them less.

I hate birthdays.

I prefer the most meaningful five dollar trinket or hand-made thing over the three-hundred dollar jewelry that i will never wear in my life. I don't care if people don't go overboard for my birthday. Honestly I prefer they don't.

I just prefer they care and it really hurts when its pretty obvious by their present they more picked it to convenience them, to make them feel better.

No, Grandpa, sending me hundreds of dollars of makeup will not make me forget all the years you ignored me for my brother and the other cousins. It still doesn't. It doesn't make up for you tearing me down each time I have an idea that does not align with your ideals. When you are so pained by the thought of me having my own thoughts that don't coincide with yours you insist I am young and dumb and know nothing. Funny you act like you know everything when you don't even bother to know me.

And my high school best friends. You complained about walking on eggshells around me, and stressing about my feelings, while I felt you barely were treating me like a human being. So the perfect remedy was to hand me several cheap journals so that I can write things out. Of course I'm left-handed and writing things out on paper hurts after about five minutes, but awesome, thanks, I totally feel the love.

Why in the world should I care about my day when every time I try to, everyone else knocks it down?

Of course I stopped trying to make it special when it always went wrong. Of course I get uncomfortable about it now. Of course I feel more dread than excitement on the one day things are supposed to be nice for me. Of course I'm so scared about it incoming, because I don't want to spend another birthday with no memories, or ones bad enough to make me dread the next one even more.

At this point I don't even know if I care about my birthday. I wish it would disappear. I want to love it and feel special and feel loved but every one I can remember didn't manage to make anything better. I feel worse with everyone that comes.

Maybe this is why I love Christmas, because my parents and grandma get me such nice things and my family gets so cozy and cheery around Christmas, that even the painful reminders don't get to me as much, and even if they do I get to see my family's smiling faces when they open presents from me, and it makes me feel a little better about the whole thing.

I should love my birthday, but I don't. And I'm sad that after 20 years I'm so worn down that even the thought of it incoming makes me want to forget it.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happiness.

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.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

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

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

Wait, my brain doesn't have toes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And everyone should be afraid of that.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

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

Its five am with so many thoughts through my head that my tongue cannot articulate and my only hope is my fingers on a keyboard.

I'm yawning and I'm tearing up but not from pain oh not this time, just from sleep deprivation caused by my love and affection and affliction against slumber.

Not far from now I'll likely nap on the couch, sincerely because I have nothing better to do, but for now I will write deliriously in hopes to make sense out of my late night or early morning musings, whatever you prefer to call this time of day.

My hair is soft and my eyes are heavy, heavy with the weight of the world and myself and all the madness surrounding me.

Why do I wake so early, why do I let things get this far?

Because I'm crazy. I could always go back to sleep, but I'm crazy. Maybe not exactly a bad crazy but the type of crazy that keeps you on the end of your seat and keeps butterflies in your stomach and keeps air in your lungs. I'm the living, breathing crazy, the fun crazy, the crazy he loves, and I don't understand it but I accept it.

That's the crazy thing so far about this year, I've been kicking the bucket when it comes to overcoming the crazy. I just seem to accept it more. So many things have happened outside of my control, and it stirs up the crazy, but there's nothing I can do. I just have to breathe that in and out until I am filled with it. Sometimes there is simply nothing I can do. And that's ok.

The trees are dark outside and I'm tired and alone and my eyes need resting and I'm still crazy.

But all of that is acceptable, as long as I manage to rest my weary heart and, just for a little while, sleep at 5:30.

I am thankful that I am not miserable, actually quite happy, and that my family is well, and that I am well, and that this break is unlikely to break me.

The last time I remember enjoying a Thanksgiving break so fully is relatively never. There are always terrifyingly large bursts of joy, but never a continuing follow-up. There has just always been something about my family that is overwhelming and, in the end, hurtful.

It seems this year after a long time of deep contemplation, I know. Maybe not all the intricate problems that behold my family, but it seems to be clear to me why I seem to be unable to handle this time of year. And it even seems silly now, looking at it, why I didn't see it before.

My family breeds contempt. Not utter hatred, we spend time together and love one another, but we hold micro-aggressions, we assume things of one another, we bicker and gossip about other family members and nitpick their actions until its hard to not give each person an endless "I love them, but", a fact that I find silly and even a little pathetic.

They spend every year cramming time together, acting like this big, fun, hysterical family when every five seconds someone turns their back they are turning on each other. I hate it. I hated it even before I realized it. Every year left me exhausted and frustrated and at some point in tears. I've never been exactly a follower in my family, and I was always torn between being like them and having as little as possible in common with their actions. And I can't put all blame on their shoulders, I was sheep when it came to them. I let myself be angry and hateful and spiteful because of stupid things each person had done.

Yes, my grandma gets jealous and out there. Yes, my dad is extremely homophobic and close-minded. Yes, many of the older family members are bitter about each other. And ******* yes is the majority of my family at least a little bit racist.

But you know what? Stupid opinions are not the problem, and they shouldn't be. Its the way we act towards one another. And yes my family literally acts like the characters from Mean Girls, but its the big picture things that are the problem.

I think my Grandma knows she's a little crazy, but I doubt she gives a **** anymore and still loves people just as deeply. And my dad is determined in his ways, but if he persisted to love a mentally ill daughter even when he didn't believe in it, I'm sure he'd get his **** together if my brother or I were gay as well. He doesn't understand, and he won't try, but love is still something that matters. And hell yes my family is racist, but they're more ignorantly and blindly racist than intently. They'd likely never say the things they say to someone they say these things about. Guess its a "I'm a privileged white person but I'm not mean" type thing. Though what they say is ******, I can't fault them for never attacking or hurting or working against these people either.

There are some I can't forgive, like those who don't even bother to try, but its not worth my happiness to suffer through their high school agendas.

So you guys can go gossip about Grandma being crazy. I'm going to write songs with her and talk about books. Complain about my Aunt being all messy after her divorce, I'm going to talk to her about our futures. Make fun of my cousins husband who is a little weird but he at least makes so very happy. I'm going to send her letters and learn more about the woman I lost touch with ten years ago.

They're probably yelling at football and being their difficult yet beautiful selves, but its enough for today, to spend most of the day with them and tonight for myself. Its all right to be the weird one. I kind of even want to be the weird one. I hope they question all day why I go on adventures and do crazy things and write novels and make art. Maybe I won't be as close to them anymore, maybe i won't understand their gripes and frustrations, but maybe at least this way they'll know me better when I'm crazy than the quiet girl who got frustrated with them but felt silent in the corner.

Torn between the summer and the fall,
Between body and soul
The river flows with ease and sway
While I flow the other way
But my flow is uneasy and falling apart,
Self inflicted enmity pouring from my heart
Is this river the one of life
Or death
For me

Broken chairs and broken windows
Losing all stability and all avenues of escape
Trapped in this empty room with river in my eyes
Confused
Whispered nothings in rooms that can never be spoken of
Screamed everythings that I dare not speak of
To you
Dancing around a maze
Jovial topiaries laugh at my plight
Fish in the river smile at my pain
Dragging me down until I’m drowning in the stream

I come up for air, and breathe a soft breath again
Saved from the flood and the heat and the pain
Not quite torn, but changed
And I stumble off into the spring

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Haven't been here in awhile, have we?

So I know its stupid to be careless, and as a writer I should always care. Well I'm saying **** that for a night. I almost put please in that sentence, then I realized I care little what you or whoever thinks. Tonight I'm alone, and I myself will deal with that.

I hate being tired. If sleeplessness came along with no tired side effects for me, I would do it constantly. But no, absolutely ******* not, I cannot get what would be convenient for me. I'm yawning left and right but i can't seem to get tired enough to lay down and pass out. Awesome.

Even hallucinations are finding it easier to get on my mind than sleep. I mean thank god they only lasted about an hour but for Christ ******* sake's, really?  This is a highly important week of my life, getting the final strands of my summer ****-storm ******* before I let myself win d down the summer, and I get this ****? Insomnia, incessant depression/tiredness, only to go away enough to give me a few hours of peace before refusing to let me go to ******* sleep.

I don't need this.

*******, body. I'm getting up between the hours of 7-8 if you like it or not. I'm spitting in your ******* face and telling you to sit the **** down. You wanna fight me? You're getting one hell of a fun sleepless day. I am getting **** down tomorrow, including the **** you didn't let me do today. *******. May I repeat that in the clearest, loudest of tones. ****. YOU. BODY.

I refuse to let everything fall apart just as I think I've got it sorted. This is not, will not, happen to me.

Just when I think I got things going right for me, you like to **** it all up. Not only you, but the universe too. I think I've found a place I belong? I get moody and needy as **** and scare people off and push them away, and get attached to the worst *******. I **** up my grades so much I can only hope to salvage them into not failing grades. I finally seem stable and happy, got everything going right, and school ******* ends. And I think its smart to get off my meds. I am such a *******. Worse, I get blood clots in my lungs so there go all my meds and for a good month I go into deep spiraling depression that almost ends the best relationship I've ever been in ,and the only one I hope to ever have again. I start getting my ******* **** together, and at the pinnacle week where I need to finish sorting it all out, you decide to flake.

Well *******, you're not allowed to.

I'll probably hate myself for this soon, but I need to push through. I will not let you **** me in and ruin what I've been working towards. So buck up, deal with tomorrow as it comes, and stop being such a ******* *******. Thanks.

I can feel it wearing on my skin, a deterioration of my bones, sandpaper on my heart, carving holes and smoothness in paces were they don't belong, polishing me into something it isn't. Inside my head I'm screaming but its hard when everyone knows better, everyone is telling me what to do, no one is willing to let me just do things my way, those ways are wrong, always wrong, and I need to stop them or else. Or else what? I'm not even sure I just know its bad and bad is bad and that's something I'm not supposed to be doing.

My body is caving in on itself, but I don't have the time for it, I'm late, so very late, for all the important dates and I can't let the axes fall and the queens to get angry for I can't waste any time with my head chopped off. I have to keep it together. I must keep it together. I have no choice but to keep it together.

I can't lose anything. I've built my mountain of progress and though my heart is being sandpapered into a mess and a circle of conformity and pain, I can't stop I can't breathe if I breathe a breath of my own air they reject it and my new lungs they gave me reject all air that is original. I can't breathe. I can't keep things together. Everything is a broken cacophony of madness and I cannot silence them and they fill my lungs and bleed me of oxygen until my body is panicking and I'm not breathing.

I want to feel better. I want the monsters gone and the fear and the shattered fragments to find their place somewhere safer than the tips of my fingers and the center of my heart. I'm so scared. I'm so tired.

I'm tired of trying and failing and having no time to breathe and when I try to give myself time to breathe I'm not better and things hurt more and everything spiraling down, down, down, and I can't stop it its like my brakes are broken and I'm careening into traffic and I'm trying to save myself but my airbags are broken and my windshield is shattered and my bones are brittle and my seat-belt is choking me and I know that if I don't get the brakes to stop soon I'll be dead but I know if I stop driving I'll hate myself more so I pray to unnamed gods and figments of my imagination to let me live past one more intersection so that I don't have to stop never stop and just keep on going forward.

I don't know if I'll make it, but I can't stand the idea of braking now. I could lose everything I've ever dreamed of, and I can't stand the thought of that.

I'm so tired and everything hurts, but I can't brake now, I can't sleep now. It might **** me but losing everything would **** me too. Stuck between a whirlpool and a seven headed *****, guess I'm picking the ***** and hoping I have enough marbles by the end to make it through.

Please stop being tired.

Catch me in the rye,
Save me from myself,
Hold me all night long,
Dare me to love thyself,
Teach the torches to burn,
Teach my heart to love,
Hold its shattered pieces inside your arms.

Save me from my horror,
Caress my wrists so soft,
Praise these scars for making,
The person that you love,
Bring my tears to reckon,
Reconcile my fears,
Fight the monsters with me,
Just don't let me go dear.

What Are We?
I look into your deep brown eyes and I wonder with every fiber of my being, with every touch of Eros, what in the world is between us?
You'd probably chuckle and say air, or, in those moments you let your guard down, nothing, but for a moment be serious. I know you hate it, I hate it, its hated like Pluto. Yet for a moment, just a moment, we need to accept there is something, not nothing, between us.
What Is This?
Your words melt on my tongue like snow, our lips bringing the sun in the middle of the storm, yet still I look at you and wonder. I'm not Alice, so I can't wonder long, and its killing me sitting here listening to my errant thoughts just screaming.
What Are You?
You're like fire and rain and hatred and love and belligerence and impossibilities and shattered glass locked up in this fleshy body with a beautiful smile. Sometimes your glass juts out, or your fire burns me at the wrong time, and sometimes I don't see enough of your flesh and being for my liking, but you are you and with each stumble you catch me and I'm amazed by you.
What Am I?
With each whispered word you insist I'm beautiful even though I know it must be a lie or a trick upon your eyes. I think I am someone you could care for, and it terrifies me, thinking you might care, because I am the queen of heartbreaks and I either fall so hard or chop off their heads. And I don't want to lose, or ****, you.
What Are We?*
We are everything, we are nothing, we are the world in two people reflecting what every fears and dreams and spends they're whole lives searching for. And maybe, just maybe, we might be falling in love.

Have you ever just felt so lonely, even in a crowded room?

Have your insides ever felt so empty,like nothing fills them but air and blood and you are nothing but meat on a spinning ball in a dying universe?

Have you ever looked at the stars and realized gas can be so magnificent, yet you, conscious, synaptic you, cannot even make yourself special to one person whom you love?

Have you ever felt the benevolence of whatever power above you weighing so heavily on your shoulders, realizing they gave you life and one wrong move and you may be wasting it?

Have you ever realized time is so short, and in the blink of an eye, the toll of a clock, it could all be over and it could all begin and everything could be different in that one second?

Have you seen the look in your mother's eyes when you realize that she isn't wonder woman, and that she is as human as you, as terrified as you, and that illusion is gone and you both are broken and innocence is so lost you spend your whole life trying to find it again?

Have you stared into the face of death and came back kicking and screaming, terrified that the next one in that coffin will be you, and that your loved ones will be the broken ones now, or possibly worse, no one would have cared at all?

Have you ever died a little inside, seeing someone you pined for and had an intense affinity for live and laugh and love in the arms of another and you want to move on but you can't because you cannot let go of the simple maybe that they could make you feel that way one day too?

Have you ever felt the heavy weight of love crush your heart, and either **** you a thousand times or lift you up to the heavens, untouchable yet so breakable, and everything could be forever or fall apart at any moment, and when your naked in their arms and more vulnerable than ever the end could be near, even when they whisper they love you in the way their hands touch your cheek and their lips caress your skin?

Have you ever felt nothing, not even when you should, and could not find the tears or the words or anything really, and become a frozen shell of a human being that feels so alone, even in a crowded room?

I am not feeling all of these right now, but I have at least once before, and they all come rushing back to me like sad songs while I sit alone in a full room, musing about life and realizing though I may be ill, I'm still human too.

I'm somewhere and nowhere.

Hear me out. This isn't meant to be profound or riddling, just me. Granted I throw up walls like a kid who ate too much cake on his birthday, but today its just me. I promise.

I know that can hard to believe, even for me. Some days I'm euphoric, some days I'm broken, or bitter or boisterous or batty. But today, I'm in between. Not in the extreme sense I'm used to, where I'm either depressed like crazy and happy like crazy and mad like crazy. None of me is crazy right now. And oddly enough that terrifies me.

I'm not happy, but I'm not sad. I'm not even feeling nothing. I'm ******* normal. I'm fine with where I am but at the same time I'm progressing forward, happily. Is this what it feel like to not be an alien?

My dad told me joking stories about how I was an alien dropped on the front yard when I was really young, but oddly enough he wasn't far off. I spent most of my childhood feeling incomplete, incomprehensible, like a human face hiding some sort of monster behind. I had a distinct instinct that the way I had to live through childhood was to hide, to keep secrets, to create parapets of stone around me to keep the people out, and to more importantly keep me in.

I grew up and hiding grew harder as the monster grew bigger, and I couldn't renovate fast enough for it. It eventually broke out of its stone home, and I was exposed. The alien girl was visible for all to see. It created chaos and it took a long time before I could feel human. I grew friends and a sewn together personality and threw my feelings into my writing, my work.

But today, something new happened. It was unlike any mood I had ever felt. I wasn't me anymore. Or, at least the me I had grown to know. I was exhausted but awake, and productive but not nearly as enthusiastic, and okay with who I was but willing to work towards something 'better'. I always considered better as something very subjective, but somehow today normal things seemed more... normal. Having a schedule, changing myself for the better even if I'm happy, setting random short term goals to make my life feel more... I don't know. Meaningful I guess? My life felt meaningful before but in this new body that feels so "normal" or "average", its like I'm working to be normal.

Its terrifyingly soothing. Its like the normal-ness lulls you into into thinking a normal life is ok. And not saying being normal is wrong. But I've lived a life being abnormal, being an outlier, an outsider, an oddity. This lullaby feels so wrong.

I always told I've learned to appreciate my condition because I don't think I could handle being normal, having less intense emotions, not understanding emotion so well. Its sounds stupid, it sounds like its glorifying mental conditions, but its not. I know the suicidal thoughts aren't good, and I know mania is danger. But I cannot help like feeling like I'm losing me.

I cannot even get myself to sob right now, or to even truly feel a suicidal thought. They won't stick. Not even for a minute. None of it. I;m ******* terrified but I can't feel I can't make myself feel who am I?

I can't be normal. I can't.

This is more maddening then the moods. Maybe I was hitting too close to home when I hypothesized a person from Wonderland would feel utterly insane in real life. Or worse, feel even crazier when sanity began creeping up on them.

I don't want to lose Wonderland. I don't know what to do. I don't know who I am. Who is residing in this body right now, whoever is containing my thoughts, it cannot be me.

I cannot let all of my insanity go.

Normal doesn't feel better, and **** all the people who think its the only way to go. Normal isn't an aspiration, its a cage, and I will not be imprisoned.

Al I can do is find a way back to Wonderland losing all control. I guess that's what I truly wanted. Not sanity, but control. Controlled chaos had always been a favorite of mine, after all. There is always a method to the madness, and I must find mine, because I certainly cannot live without it.

Who knew Grace would have to remember how to be crazy?

I refuse to be normal. I refuse to be in-between. I will always belong to Wonderland, to madness, and **** whoever says that's not a proper life.

Its the life for me, so frankly, I don't give a ****.

I know our lives will never be easy. I knew that before I met you, when you were just an idea in my head of that man I might marry. When I met you I didn't even know it. I spoke to you like I had known you for years, was comfortable like that, but didn't see until a month later that hey, maybe we have something here.

We met because of cheap college ***, which of course you would think would be a letter of doom from the beginning. But somehow it worked. It hasn't been perfect, but it works.

Don't tell middle school me, but she was totally right about you. Hard to open up, daring, risky, cocky, goofy, had trouble with friends, and somehow still my best friend. Of course she didn't exactly picture it like this, but somehow she knew you. She knew you'd come, even before she knew we were broken.

Of course, she got a couple things wrong. You're not as tall, and you don't have blue eyes, and we haven't been best friends since childhood, but most importantly you never left me. I guess instead of having the pain of losing you and finding you again, I had to live my teenage years without you. I don't exactly know what I'd prefer, but I know I prefer anything with you.

I know the way I am doesn't make things easy. I know we have had our rocky times. But god have I been such an *******. More than just this past month. I got myself in this manic stupor where I was convinced after winter break that all the decisions were mine to make. When you called me a child, I didn't worry about you breaking up with me. I thought it impossible. It was like all I saw was my emotion, and totally ignored yours.

But last week, when you revealed to me that a breakup had crossed your mind, it shattered me. I was already feeling like such a ***** for all I had done to you that past month, but that moment I knew it had been much longer than that. I forgot that I wasn't the only important one. I forgot that all the decisions weren't mine. They were ours.

Dealing with my bipolar lately has made me selfish and blind. Granted, I needed to be selfish to live through what happened to me first semester,  but after that I was just being greedy. My grades improved, I had all the friends I could want, I had a future, and I had you.

I loved you loving me unconditionally, but its time to be fair. Its time for you to feel, to express, to live. This isn't all about me. Its about you, and us. It wasn't fair for me to do that to you for so long, and now I'm here to make it right, but ******* do I love you. Not in the loud way, but the quiet way that creeps up on you and holds your hands and kisses your forehead and suddenly you realize you're in love.

When I told you I loved you for the first time, I loved the person who made me stop being scared and put me first. I loved the person who was my friend, and made me feel special, and made me feel wanted.

I loved what you did for me, and now, as I finally see you, I just love you. I love all of you.

And as long as I can, I will love me loving you, just like you deserve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lot has happened since I last looked at the girl in the reflection, and I mean really look. Look into her blue green movie screen eyes and scorn that sarcastic smirk and wonder why she lies so much.

Strangely enough, on some days I am beautifully broken glass, and I am able to accept that. But some days I am still fifteen, and I still wish more than anything I never have to feel that way again.

Yet, those days that I'm fifteen sometimes mean so much more than the days I'm average, the days I'm nobody special. The days I am broken lead to make the days I am elated to be even brighter, like sunlight. They make my cheerful days ones of pure sunshine.

I have finally solidified friends who accept the darkness and the light, and love me regardless. They have been welcomed into Wonderland and to not turn nor run. But Wonderland is another place in another time that should not be spoken of here.

So I digress.

Her story is still the most foreign yet familiar ting to me, for I still pretend it didn't happen yet know so fully that it is my life. New people have joined the ranks of those fallen from me, and many have also joined themselves to my sides. Some days are perfect, some days are hell, but i would have it no other way.

I am beautifully broken glass and the stars in my life, those I show affection for and who return that love, accept and possibly even love me for it.

And that's all I could ever wish for.

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.

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