Tick, tock, tick, tock.

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

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

Wait, my brain doesn't have toes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And everyone should be afraid of that.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

Its been a journey, Wonderland.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I forgot to take my medicine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I took my meds today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to fly and forget it all.

Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock.

So this is the end.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, I will be home again.

Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock.

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

I am dangerous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

God help me I'm coming undone.

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

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

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

It'll die.

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

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

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

Bipolar.

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

Bipolar.

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

Bipolar.

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

Bipolar.

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


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

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

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

I will never lead another little girl into wonderland.

Never.

Ring, ring, ring, ring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ring, ring, ring...

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

I do.

Five. Cinco.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, that's not right.

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

Funny how Alice the savior became Alice the bat.

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

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

Its not love.

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

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

But it matters.

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

Still, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It never will.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll name her Alice.

Before you, no one I had fallen for had ever really seen me naked.

No, not the literal way with the clothes off and the skin bare and the turn ons. More people than I'd like have seen me that way.

With you its like you see me, see deeper than my soft skin and deeper than my bones, you see right through me and break down the walls I've been carrying up for so long.

You've managed to see that I'm tied together with a smile, but with you I come undone. You see me, no guts, not glory, just plain, broken, unattractive me and somehow you find it beautiful. I know you do, but the fact that you do still astounds me.

After waking up so many mornings next to you, sometimes i wish it was the only way I could wake up anymore. Sometimes nights haunt me, and they torment me and torture me with the memories of my past and the shadows of my own darkness, but in the morning, its just you and me and I'm happy. I love how purely happy I am to glance over to your sleeping face and realize that maybe for once I did something right, maybe I chose right.

I'm falling in love with you, I hope you know. Each second the feeling compounds until sooner or later I won't be able to stop myself from saying I am in love. But for now, I'm content with falling. Most times it terrified me, it broke me down to tears, because I was fully aware the person I was falling for would not be there to catch me.

But with you? Oh you, I know you. You'd do anything to be at the bottom of that cliff, right where you belong, ready to catch me when I'm done.

You, the one who I never expected. You see me better than most people have in years. You are strong even when you don't fully believe it, and remain confident even when you feel insecure.

There is one promise I must make to you, unexpected one, and its this; I may falter and I may break down every once in a while, and you may feel like you always have to be strong for me, but I will always be there for you. I will always try to smile for you. I will do anything to make sure you stay the strong, confident person you are because I know that's who you want to be. I will try to keep you strong even when you feel at a loss. I will take down my walls and instead put them elsewhere to hold you up, and not quite protect you from the world, but make that strength of yours easier to bear. I will fight my disorder. I will for you.

Why?

Because you've seen me naked, and instead of wishing for the happy me or shunning the sad me or insisting the sadness isn't real, you held me and promised things would get better and promised I could be stronger than I think I am. And for that I will never falter.

Now that you've seen me imperfect, and now that I see you naked too, there is no going back.

And there is no way I would want to.

Everything has to change, eventually. But I didn't expect to ever stand on the edge of the world with you of all people and have to realize things are changing far too rapidly for any of us to handle.

You're holding my hand, and making promises you probably can't keep. Its breaking my heart as you scream "Grace, you're the only one for me" when I know you've said it time and again before and they never were the one for you, were they?

Its ok, I thought your best friend was the one. That was until he wasn't. So maybe in this moment, you aren't lying, for this second, maybe I am your one. But who knows if that'll stay, if that will remain, for rarely anything remains the same.

Maybe I've made a mistake forging my heart in the shape of your name, and maybe one day it'll morph itself into another, but for now making memories with you is all the new I want.

And then there's you. We fight, we cry, we love. But I don't know if we're right anymore, and part of me can dream of a world without you. That kills me, because you were my everything. I spent every day with you and I hate myself for thinking of how it might be easier to be apart.

The hollow hallways of my heart once were filled with you, but now I don't know if you belong in every avenue anymore. Maybe your just a conditional love now, something that hurts even to admit. You were once a world I could orbit around, but now as my own planet I can see myself out of your solar system.

And finally, you. The one I cannot fathom losing.

I don't even want to talk about the thought of losing you.

God how I hate everything new.

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 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.

Its such a funny thing, isn't it? They can mean anything and everything under the sun as long as you have a different perspective on them. It could be work or exercise or mental stability or social life or family or whatever can be done.

But in the end it all seems to boil down to one thing: happiness. That seems cheap and simple, but its true. The only complex part is the balance between long-term and short-term happiness choices to work towards actual happiness.

Long-term obligations that you care about tend to not always make you happiest in the moment, but if used right, can make you so happy for far longer. And the opposite is true for short-term. Quick happiness traded for possible long-term pain, if abused too often.

No matter how spontaneous I enjoy life and how scared I am of that, it all seems to boil down to that one word. Balance. It never seems that anyone can or should ever completely erase a habit or trait from their life. Its finding a balance to sate yourself without killing it in the process.

This week has felt comforting and strange and new, but also very oddly omniscient, almost like a social experiment where I attempt familial relations. Good job team, this week has been a success. You can all go home now.

Obligations can be boring but important, and seem frivolous but be important as well. It depends on you and what keeps your boat afloat.

Life is strange, but its interesting to observe it and learn it and try to figure out just exactly how to live it without being hurt. And honestly there is no fool-proof way, but for now, a sense of balance and working towards that seems good enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream.

But I also walked with you, and you, and you.

After losing my caterpillar, after sending him away, my dreams are a jumbled mess of maybes, from one boy to another, my mind swimming haphazardly in all the possibilities that I have no clue who I am falling for or who is most on my mind.

I just want to be close to people. I want to love people, and I want to be kissed, and I want to dance in the rain.

I don't even know if i want it to be real, or just one person, i just want to dream and want someones to hold my hand and make me feel like I belong.

You and Me and all other people and I can't keep my eyes off of you.

Make me feel that, someone, anyone.

Bueller?

Give it time, things will fall into place, like leaves onto water, stumbling through the air until they reach the place where they belong, calm and kinetic all at once.

Until things fall, until I land, I will fall and dance with all the people I love, holding so many hands and seeing where my dreams take me. Until I find You, until I find the one who makes me stop looking, I will never stop dancing. I will become the most vibrant, exciting, lovable me.

For you only.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But  didn't.

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

Just maybe.

We met when I was very young, and I loved her in an instant. Everything about her was magical; the touch of her skin, the words on her lips, and particularly, the way I could talk to her. I could talk to her like I could talk to no one else.

My mother introduced me to her, in the playtime hours of my youth, and I was quickly enamored. She was fun and unique and something I could make all my own. We ran together for hours and hours, laughing and crying and feeling everything life had to offer. Even as I grew older, she was always there, making me squeeze out every bit of life I had in me and make me taste it. She was beauty in sadness, in a world other than my own, but I fought with all my might to spend if only day on her planet. We were not in love, but we loved as if in love, with all our hearts and all our tears. There was not a romance between us, but I was hers. I’d like to think that in some ways, though she was ethereal and grand and far too good for me, I held a little bit of her too.

I never quite knew what led me to her, be it fate or destiny, but once I found her, I knew she was where I belonged. She was home. I could walk a thousand miles, and maybe even a thousand more, but I’d still belong as long as I was beside her.

She’s had many who loved her, over decades and centuries, but somehow she was still innocent and new to me, and while we grew up together, she stole my heart more than I could ever fathom. She was there when my brother died, and those times when I was abandoned by the persons I loved most, and when the shackles of madness caved in on my soul, she was there. There are a few who love me and stand by my side, and I adore them for it, but none stood by my side like her. She has never left me, and I hope she never will.

When I lose my words, I look to her. She is the solace in insanity, the wonder of my wonderland. I can always feel the beating, the hands on the door, begging to break me, to shake me, to destroy all I have ever fought for. It’s in time with the beating my heart, because god only knows it’s my own hands beating. But in the darkness, she holds my hands tight and begs me to stop the destruction and saves me from whatever I am.

I’ve changed many a time throughout my time, hell, I’ve changed at least three times this morning, but she is always there to care for me regardless is I’m up or down, sad or mad, or simply insane. She is a rock, no, titanium, something not weathered much by time, just always there, always watching, always caring.

She is my purpose, she is my soul, and though those statements seem outlandish, I truly believe them. I never would have made it to today if it wasn’t for her. She is my love and my writing. And now, here we are. On the precipice of the universe, and she’s offering me all I could ever dream of. My future was always a mystery to me, but now with my eyes wide open, standing next to her, I know she is my future, and she was my past, and in an odd way she is everything to me, It’s been a complex voyage, true, and I’ve had much opposition to my affections. Many have spoken of how it is a selfish dream, a fanciful dream, a dream that will be unlikely to come true. But this is my choice.

Me and her against the world, and I wouldn’t have in any other way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mood stabilizers, they call them, but in some ways, they're more like painkillers for your heart. They numb the feelings so that you don't have the extreme moods you are accustomed to.

When you have a mood disorder, everything you feel is so much more intense, and so much more certainly snowballs out of control. That's most of the problem; the complete lack of control you have over your chaotic emotions.

But then you go to a doctor, and they give you happy little pills called stabilizers to do just as they're told to. Stabilize you. Normalize you.

Funny thing is, even with the little heart painkillers, you'll never be normal. Even if you keep up a fantastically ordinary facade, you will never be ordinary. You will always have those little pills in your pocket telling you that you are not good enough the way you are, that you must change.

Its a double-edged sword, these pills. Because some days you wonder why you can't just be you, why do you need these drugs in your veins, but then you remember the cuts on your arms and the painful nights where you drowned in your own tears and you remember why even you don't think the person you are is acceptable. Get better, Grace, be better, Grace. The words pound in your ears until you forget who you used to be and you are always striving to be something more, something better. You strive until it kills you.

You are stronger, you can beat it, they say.

What if I don't want to beat it, though, just want to have control of it? I never want to feel less than everything, I never want to feel so dull and numb that it kills me more than the pain ever did, I never want to beat myself, I simply want to be me but controllable.

Because right now I'm uncontrollable and that's terrifying.

Painkillers for your heart, numbing you until you can't feel anymore. But sometimes I wonder if I really want to feel numb.

Do I want to be me, or who everyone wants me to be?

One is safer than the other, but which one is really living?

Because all I want is to feel alive, but I don't know whether surviving will entail that.

Painkillers or killer pain.

That is my decision, one I'm not ready to make. Maybe tomorrow, when mania is not so close to my throat.

Maybe tomorrow, because I am far too afraid of today.

Paper, thin and fragile, like my lips against yours,
I forgot how to articulate the poems of my fingertips when you kissed me.
Regret the words I didn't say, too shocked, too scared,
to realize the gravity of the sky when you are in it.
I should have whispered kiss me again.

I've been silencing myself in this matter, covering my mouth with colors and nails to hide the truth, painting the roses red so that no one can see what's really wrong beneath. But I've been banging my pretty red rose head against the walls and floors trying to get it to work how I want again, and I'm slowly feeling everything slip away between the blades dancing on my fingertips.

Come back, old friend. I feel so lost without you. The hours drag on and on and I forget time, space, existence. Am I real any longer? All I do is mundane tasks that may advance my pawn two steps but the soul is all gone.

My fingers have not constructed any stories or poems or the things that keep my heart beating in too long. Has been weeks or a month? I have no clue. It seems like forever. Forever since I could write. Come back to me, please, I am so lost without you.

I rock and smile and sit and spin like a normal girl with normal motions and emotions but none of it feels real, not without the words. They're not spinning in my head and when my head is not constantly racing and spinning in thoughts I forget who I am. Its funny that the less lost my head is the more lost I am.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

I want the fire the ashes, the fall and the fly, but I can't seem to get my sand-block feet to move their correct spaces. No fight nor fear can live here while the woman soldier sit on her head, on her hands, stuck spinning and spinning until the world falls apart around her.

I need the blue, the words, the stories in my head to be rushing and reeling once more. I need a new forever to sustain me for the next couple months. A new love to fall into before I let it go for the next. The blue has grown and become its own and is nearly over, and I must find anew before I can truly let it go. But what can I do?

The anger and depression has been dealt with. What can be new?

The silence, the guilt?

My Star Crossed Killer seems to be the best for such things. Possibly I could use her to save myself. Or anything. Just any and all stories. I want them all.

Perhaps this poem or whatever this is, an emotional dump, a monologue of madness, be it what it is, maybe it can be a beginning. A new one, where I won't feel so lost without the blue, one where I can find something new.

One can only hope that their mind can adhere to their desperate pleas.

Come back, please.

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.

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.

Dear Person I Despise Most,

God, I am on the brink of the best year of my life. I have just finished my first novel, and I actually think I might try to publish it. I have a gorgeous, ****, wonderful boyfriend of almost a year who deserves every bit of my love. I have great friends who don't expect me to be anyone but myself, and don't judge me when I get a little crazy. I am going to be in writing classes learning new skills that may not always help me write better stories, but make me more creative and bold and strong. I am starting my second year in a place that has made me such a better person, and I love all of it.

And on the eve of all that glory, I relapse.

Not those **** Jabberwocky thoughts, not even the little cuts that keep them away. But you. ******* you.

I don't know what I thought I'd expect when I told myself I'd just "check on you for a second". I should have known better. I should have known some sick part of me loves being angry and upset and hate you for thinking such stupid things all the time. For being so pretentious and entitled and sickening.

I was annoyed enough when I read your obnoxious posts about how gorgeous and hot and wonderful your boyfriend was. You guys break up every three minutes and still you fawn over him like a god.

But I digress.

I thought it was harmless. That nothing would come of it. That this would just be a little bit and probably the last time and no big deal.

Then you said it. You said you spent a year keeping someone alive.

If its me, then *******. You may have helped, but you did not ******* keep me alive. If I wanted to truly die, it would have happened. You are not the lone holy spirit that kept me afloat in my time of need. And in all honesty, halfway through you turned head and ****** me over, so please, kindly, shut your face.

And even if its not. What gives you that right to say you were keeping this person alive? If you truly were the only person they had, and they were in that much danger, go get them help. Tell people. Call the police or something. Don't just sit there and hold their hand so you can one day hold it over them that you 'kept them living' . That's ******* and manipulative and no one deserves that. And if they weren't that bad, if they had other people, don't take the credit like you are some righteous savior. Some pure soul who did nothing wrong. I spent a hell of a lot of time with you, and you are no angel, dear.

Funny thing is though, I keep on trying to get away from this. And I even keep on trying to protect you. I block you on things so you don't have to see this. So you don't have to see my stupid anger and hate because though you are no picnic and you were a manipulative ***** to me, it doesn't mean you deserve you to feel bad about my bad choices of seeking you out to look up. I'm also to blame in this, I looked for you again. But don't blame me if you searched this out when I made precautions to try that you wouldn't see this.

You know, I think the reason I still search you out is so that I can see if you're better and if you're not, to make myself promises to never be anything like you. Anger tends to fuel me a lot. I mean, my hatred for how people see love stories and suicides and depression got me to write my novel, which I adore. And your repetitive pretentious writing always did make me fight to write better, because though your type of writing was like candy to teens, I wanted mine to be the vegetables. ******* lame metaphor, but I am hyped up and its late at night, sue me. Regardless, I wanted to be the story people needed to read, that really made them think and grow, instead of what placated them as an easy read. Who knows, maybe if you could finish a story you could be a more popular novel. But I don't want to be popular, I want to matter. I want to make a difference. I don't want a quick buck, I don't want my writing to turn into some stupid marketing ploy to get me rich. I want to be classic. I may be shooting for ******* Pluto and I may not get what I want but at least I gave it one hell of a shot.

I do in a way want you to get better, to do something with your life and not be a mess. I'm happy you're trying. Maybe something will work out.

But I never want to be like you. And that has to be another reason I look, to fuel me and make sure I never sound like you, or think like you, because I know you are not who I want to be. I could never live with myself if I was pretentious and "tragically beautiful'. I'm just a regular person, with a few irregularities about her. I'm not some kind of epic heroine trying to write a tragically beautiful story for myself. I just want to live a nice life with people I love. My characters can live the beauty and/or tragedies that pull at heartstrings.

I'll never not be different, but I'm not letting that define me. Once, you got mad at me for letting my mental illness define me. Maybe it did then, but its certainly now true now. I'm not a crazy girl, I'm just a girl who happens to be a little crazy.

Make sure to take your own advice next time, and maybe next time I stupidly relapse I'll be a little bit proud, under all the annoyance.

I'm not meaning my opinion should matter in your life, though. And honestly yours shouldn't matter in mine. I'm slowly getting towards that. Maybe eventually we'll both get over this. Maybe you already are. I dunno. I don't talk to you. I sure as hell never will again. But for now, see you til next relapse.

Sincerely,

That Friend You Had Once A Long Time Ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When will I ever be satisfied?

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

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

Will I have to not be me anymore?

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

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

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

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

What is it like to be satisfied?

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

In my life I have had the very unpleasant experience of being attached to two manipulative, insane, selfish *******. Of course, these people I was attached to simultaneously so I was a bit of a crazed mess during that time. I was so desperate for attention and love I took it from people who would ultimately use me for their own personal gain. **** those two, specifically, thank you very much.

One I had a crush/****** attraction to, the other was my best friend. **** me, right? Well they certainly did. I may have put myself in those situations, but **** them for still taking advantage of it.

The first, I was fascinated by. He was a year older than me and seemed nice and funny and had my same humor and liked the same movies. i thought we could be compatible, who knew? So I tried it out. I hung out with him more at school, got his number, all that. We started to text a lot, and at first we just joked around and talked about things we liked,  then I started talking about him about my feelings and serious things and we got quite close.

I should have known something was up when he started getting ****** all of a sudden, and started asking for **** pictures, and trying to convince me into ****** things.

I dodged his ****** advances for some time, but eventually I caved and when we went to get ice cream once. I took off all my clothes in his car and he called me beautiful but it wasn't the type of beautiful a girl wanted to be called. He liked my body and my big ***** and my willingness to do this, not me. But still, I sort of gave him a half-assed ******* before he dropped me off at home.

Funny thing is I never even kissed that *******. Not even once. Kind of happy I didn't.

A week later, I decided to disclose to him that I was bipolar, so that he understood me better, and maybe our relationship could develop. But the second I said I was bipolar, he said he had a girlfriend. Of course the one second I'm not even caring about any romantic relationship with him, he decides to jump that on me.

I stopped texting him. I was ******. The girl he was now dating was someone he pretty much had told me was only his best friend, not anyone he was interested in, but that was obviously a lie. And the whole time he was getting closer to her and pursuing her, he was using me as his ****-talk and eye candy. Worst thing was she was a sweet girl who had some similar features to me, and I didn't want to ruin her world by telling her that her best friend and now boyfriend was a manipulative *******.

They're still dating to this day, and I know at this point it would be fruitless for me to try to stop it. She'd probably say I'm a liar or that I'm making stories up or whatever. I guess I just wish her the best of luck. The only good thing that came out of it was that he never became my boyfriend, so I didn't get lied to. I just got the occasional request for nudes or odd being hit on text that are easy to brush off. She wants to spend the rest of her life with him. I truly pity her for being stuck to that, and truly thinking he's a good guy.

Now the other. We collided as kindred souls who like writing, the arts, music, and are a little crazy. But hell did that go out there fast, and of course I didn't realize I needed to get the **** out until three years too late.

It wasn't long before the friendship turned into a competition. I'm competitive, so I won't say I'm not to blame at all, but she pretty much was the one to instigate most of it. By telling me she was better. That she was wonderful. That her work was revered by everyone, or she got special training, or that she was just so much more than me.

The girl honestly thought she was the second coming of Jesus sometimes, because she was so different and special. But also, she was tortured and misunderstood and needed loving. **** that, you needy *******. Everyone has problems. Get help and deal with them. Its cute and understandable for a few months. By three years you better get off your ******* *** and do something.

She always was the 'better' singer, because she was more trained. She was the 'better' romantic entanglements because she was so 'well-versed' in ****** things. She was always 'better' at being mature because she had gone through so much more than anyone else. She just thought she was better at everything, but at the same time would hate herself. It was awesome. She was basically saying "I'm a complete piece of awful ****, but I'm better than you!"

Sounds annoying, right? Well it was.

The one that really got me was that she always professed she was a better writer. That her writing was beautiful and poignant and tortured. Every longer story I read of hers she basically wrote about herself, used pretentious names, and every one of her protagonists was some madly tortured person who no one understood. Their lives would drastically change once they met this magical person that changed everything. That hit them just the right way. But honestly most of it was about being tortured and misunderstood, but somehow better than everyone else because of it. Ok, whatever, please sit down pretentious writer number 3,467. It just drove me nuts. She wasn't bad at it, but it was always the same thing. Being tortured, or bitter, or being grossly in love with someone. It was just so horribly repetitive and outlandish I couldn't stomach most of it. To this day every time I read some of her pretentious work i want to set her on fire and slowly watch her burn. She may be a better singer, she may be a better tortured soul, she may even be a better starving artist or whatever.

But actually writing variety and real people and not repeating the same thing over and ******* over again?

Please, honey, I got you beat.

I guess I'm just sick of them. I'm sick of what they did to me, what I let them do to me, and who I became with them. I was selfish and meek and competitive and always trying to prove myself to them. I know who I am, and they don't deserve my attention or even me. **** them.

I know writing will get me somewhere. I'm not the best writer ever, but I know how to write. I always have. I have finished novels. I'm working on more to come. I have the drive and ability to do this, and I don't want to be the cliched ******* starving artist. I don't want to be poetically tortured or whatever the **** pretentious ******* strive for. I just want to be a human writing stories for other humans. And maybe it'll mean a lot to someone one day. It already does to me.  


I don't need flaky ******* who want nothing from me but to use me for their selfish gains. I'm me. I'm happy. I can be a writer and artist without being a complete ******* about it. And I don't need them.

I got this.

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.

There it is, in the corner of my eye. Or peeking around a nearby corner.

Either the shadows are alive or my madness has caught me, finally.

Over my shoulder I feel the monster, its breath on my skin, the heavy weight of its hands around my neck, suffocating me in my own paranoia.

Some days I wonder if its the fear or my mind breaking ever so slowly, melting each day within the poison known as my synapses. Am I imagining things because I am fearful, or fearful because I am imagining things?

I don't tell many a person about this. The mood disorder, they can handle. But seeing things? Oh, that tends to be a tipping point for most people. Even myself. I like to pretend I see nothing so that I don't have to admit maybe I'm worse off than I think.

I see you there, lurking in my peripheral vision, trying to **** me. But when I look I see my face, smiling that maniacal grin and showing off those sharp teeth, not my teeth, and all the blood, so much blood, my blood.

Suddenly my surroundings are uncomfortable, so prickling with my own horrific imaginings that they almost feel all too real.

Funny how my mind pictures all these terrifying creatures, all these monsters from beyond the grave, while the real monster was hiding all along in my mirror.

The monster, the shadow, is me.

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.

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.

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.

Lips as red as rose, skin as white as snow, body as still as stone. Yet this was not the fairy tales that I had been raised to believe in. This had no happily ever after.

    The heavy weight of the melancholy anguish fell awkwardly on my shoulders. I was barely old enough to even understand what sorrow was, let alone what to do when every person I had ever admired was now helplessly crumbled in the solid white room. Unthankful walls stared bleakly down at us, as they were numb to these feelings by now. It was a hospital, after all. They had seen their fair share of the dead.

    Something strong, pressuring, and overwhelming continued to force itself into my chest, burrowing itself deeper and deeper. Nothing had ever felt like that, as if it was eating me until I was nothing myself. When I glanced around to my family, I could see that it had them too. Consuming them in this helpless, dark pressure, the kind you only pretend to escape. Drying them of the good memories and replacing them with pain and despair. Squeezing them until tears fell from their eyes so much I had almost forgotten what they looked like without them.

    A voice beckoned me to the side of the bed. The smile that had filled my childhood was replaced with broken eyes and a grin that I knew was a lie. I wanted nothing more but to crawl into her arms and cry until everything stopped hurting so much, but I was too afraid. For in my mother’s eyes I saw she wanted more than anything to do the same.

     Dad’s arm came around me and held me tight, he needed it as well. It was terrifying, to be able to compare my parents to how I looked after a nightmare. They were kids again, frightened, and desperate, and alone. All they wanted was a hug and smile and someone to tell them it would be okay, that the terror was nothing but a dream. Sadly, we would never wake up this time.

     The nurse came around with a camera,  and I knew then that this was the last time we would see him. I glanced down at the perfect little face I realized I would miss for the rest of my life. With the pressure eating my heart, I said inside goodbye to the little boy I had dreamed to know. His body, small and teaming with untapped potential and dead life, was an image I would never be able to forget. Yet he never even got the chance to see his big sister’s face. Maybe it was better that way, never seeing what he lost as we saw him. Things were going to be different now, without him. Things would never be the same. A nurse started to count.

     And in a broken photograph, I smiled.

Smile in the darkest hour, where the weeping willows cry their song,
while the blood drains from my face, while the funeral procession marches on.
Smile when I'm dead and tired, sleeping in my wooden home,
remembering these forlorn years, when I lay in your arms.
Smile as I die tonight, weep no more my dear, for summer delight is drawing close,
death becomes nothing to fear.
Smile when I close my eyes, a final whisper goodbye.
Smile when you dry your tears, for forever I will be near.
Smile.

There's something sweet, and almost kind, somewhere deep beneath the sarcasm on his lips and the laughter in his hips.

There is no moment here, nothing that tells me how I feel or how I should feel, just happiness. He makes me happy. That's more than I can ever ask out of a person who obviously is just as uncertain about what they really want as I.

He says he wants ***, he says he wants a friend, but when he grasps my hand and holds me close at night, I feel something else.

There's something there, but I'm not sure if I want it there yet.

I'm getting over the caterpillar, and we're all still mad here, so Grace is a little befuddled by her own heart and mind and soul, but he seems to see me and accept me and not treat me like a breakable little girl. He treats me like a young woman, full of life and laughter, even when I don't feel like that woman I want to be and he insists I am.

He called my annoying laughter wonderful and...

and there's something there. I just don't know how I feel about it.

Only time will tell.

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.

About that soon?





Nevermind

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

Stars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But they just hope so dearly to not be alone.

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

In the starlight, you are never alone.

My body's like a telegram, but nobody is listening to each other. Stop. The voices in my head won't let me think or express all I can hear is endless screaming as if an entire civilization is burning to the ground inside my synapses but no, its just me, only me. Stop. The words are whirling and winding down the rabbit hole and I don't know why or what I'm feeling but it won't go away I try so hard and it sits here, heavy, on my chest like a monster. Stop. Its not even sitting, no its burrowing itself into me, laying eggs, creating a colony of pain and anger and sadness that I can't push away. Stop. My fingers dig into my skin and my tears beg for reckoning, but I am fully aware there's not much I can do, I fought all day and here it is, taking up residence within me. Stop. Everything within me is fighting against me, my basic human nature is gone and all the instincts are dangerous impulses to hate, punish, ****** every cell within me. Stop. I want to learn how to deal with this and I want to get help but the universe seems to be against me and with every tick of my fingers it hurts all the more. Stop. They're inside they're everywhere, they're pulling on my hair and it all hurts and I don't know why and I have no one to blame but I just want it all to stop. Stop. Make it stop. Stop. I don't want this I hate it if I could stop I would but I can't make it, it won't let me and I hate it hate it stop please go away I don't want any of this. STOP. I think I get better I try everything I work hard I do things all day then it just creeps in and eats me and consumes my soul and I can't feel who I am anymore and I hate this monster I don't want it make it stop I hate it I hate it. STOP. STOP. STOP.

But I'm so afraid it never will. Stop.

Winter seems to pull us together, doesn't it, love? Its as if the times things seem to want to pull us apart we get stronger.

Last winter, I gave you my heart, and you haven't left since. This year it seems my cautionary head, always so untrusting of itself and others, has decided of one certain thing: it wants to spend forever with you.

Its funny to me, how I never go all googlie-eyed as my high school friends always told me it would be. They would ooh and ah over some boy, and I'd always roll my eyes. I always thought such cooing was silly. Their bitter response was often that I didn't understand, and once I really loved someone I'd feel the same.

But now here I sit, more certain than anything that I love you more than anyone else. And you know what I'm doing? I'm not cooing, I'm not boasting of your infinite wonder. I'm not getting at all googlied-eyed.

I'm sitting here shaking my head, laughing to myself, as if to say "****."

****, I did not know it would be like this. That you would be like this. That there could be rhythm and method to an unpredictable, spontaneous, messy relationship. That I would feel more connected and in sync with you than I feel adoration or reverence. You're not some hunky guy in third period, you're basically just the best tumor I've ever gotten attached to my hip. A tumor that I'm better off keeping.You make me better. And I, you.

They were right, I don't understand. But not because I don't how to love, its because that's not how I love. I love in nose kisses and **** grabs, in steamy texts and playful jabs at your brilliance. And yes, by god, you are brilliant. But I don't worship you. I just wish to be able to fall asleep to your face and stand by your side.

And those googlie-eyes are in no way how you love either. You don't rub my feet and call me princess. You kiss me hard and tickle my neck, read my writing and break me down when I'm irrational. But you do love me, still. You love me in the way that you try to understand and not be so stubborn. You love me in the way that you sing to me when I'm moody. And my favorite way you love me is the hand across the table when I'm fighting the tears I never want to let fall down my face.

Love isn't just about adoration and attraction and compatibility. Yes, we are attracted to each other, admire each other, and are compatible enough. But I guess our best asset is how stubborn we are to keep on loving each other that gets us through. And I think that's my favorite way we love each other entirely.

Maybe love works different for other people, and I'm fine with that. But these winters just seem to show me that we're different. We both know we've always been different. You're the lonely genius and I'm the unstable creative. But I help make you less lonely, and you help make me more stable.

And now I find it hard to picture a day without you.


So winter distance may keep us apart, but I think I've learned by now its going to take a lot more than a little distance to tear us apart. Or maybe its just the stubborn in me saying so.

Regardless, I hope the stubborn in you thinks so too.

I'm a walking disaster; a ticking time bomb.

Yet they still want to be around me. Why?

Don't waste your heart on a wild thing.

I walk alone.

I should walk alone.

All I do is hurt and scream and cry and damage. No one should put themselves through such torture for love.

Love isn't worth this.

There's a million questions swirling in my head, screaming at me to do something, to be something, but I don't know what that is.

Miss Independent?

Somebody's somebody?

My heart is giving out. I don't know what to write anymore. So much screaming, so much pain, so much fear. I'm afraid of everyone and they should be afraid of me.

I'm suffocating in my own misery.

And I don't know how to stop it.

I don't know if I can.