I wrote this about a year and a half ago, so mind you, I was but a mere 14 and a half years of age. I've detected problems in the plot and grammatical errors, but I don't want to take away from what it was when I first created it. Thank you.*

There are times that I decide that I must stop, so I pause in my placid, scheduled routine, and wonder about life, and how I came to be such a disheveled human being. I stare at the repetitive pattern of white squares on the ceiling, count the squares a couple of times (it's always 54), and just think. My thoughts bounce around my head persistently, I can feel them hitting against my head, back and forth, back and forth, never stopping. They slither like evil, determined serpents, throughout my veins, around my face, between my fingers. My thoughts fuse together with my dreams, intermingling with my memories, desires, the lies I was fed every day as a child, and the constant anger so close to the surface, but for what reason it is truly there, I was never able to figure out.
Each time I feel the need to think, I start with the same beginning, that same beginning which my mother repeated to me so many times, every morning, every hour on the hour, every night. “You are Todd Stevens. You have beautiful green eyes, the color of emeralds. You are as quick as a fox, and as sharp as a needle. Your mama loves you very much. You've got a great future ahead of you. You killed your sister, Holly, but mama still loves you.” After that, which was so deeply penetrated into my skull, it would be impossible for me to forget it, my thoughts would wander and dwindle down the stream of consciousness.
On this particular day, my thoughts were focused on my current position in life. If I had such a great future ahead of me, why is it that I'd been locked away in an asylum for the past ten years? My mama never lied, she was the best thing that ever happened to me, except maybe Holly. She was my twin sister; we looked so much alike, we could get away with trading places and mama would never even know. We both had the same cropped tawny, brown hair, piercing green eyes, and olive colored skin. I looked down at my flesh, and saw my sister's hands before me. I tried to remember the last memory I had of her, tried to remember how I killed her.
“Todd,” she had called out from behind a door, the door my mama always told us never to go into, 'cause it was our daddy's workshop. “Todd, please help me.” she had whimpered.
“Holly, I'll help you.” I yelled, clawing at the door and grasping for the doorknob. It wouldn't budge. My mama was standing at her doorway, looking at me with the most pitiful eyes I had ever seen. She was sniffling a whole lot, and had one hand behind her back. I became entranced in her stare, and I immediately ignored the small cries of Holly from behind the door. Mama starts approaching me, and I saw something silver in her hand. And then it ends, just like that. I never saw or heard about Holly again. A lot of my memories ended that way, seeing mama come at me with a silver thing. But I always woke up, very happy, if not a little bit ache-y. She'd sit there and run her hands through my hair, and murmur her repetition to me, over and over. My name was still Todd Stevens, I still had green eyes, I was still quick and sharp, mama still loved me, I still had aspirations, and I still killed my sister.
Mama was always the best thing in my life. She loved me a lot, really cared about me. She never truly appreciated Holly as much, but that was fine by me. Sometimes, when Holly had been jealous, she'd yell at me, so loud that it pulsated throughout my head like the ocean waves on the shore. I'd never been to the shore, but mama showed my videos of it all the time. She never let us out of the house, she said she didn't want the other kids laughing at us. I would ask why anyone would laugh at us, and she would just smile and shake her head, and say, “Oh, you're special Toddy.”
I look up at the ceiling again, because I'm feeling too emotional, and count the 54 squares again. Thinking of mama always makes me feel funny, especially when I think of the day she sent me to the place I've lived in ever since, this asylum I call home.
It was all of a sudden, one day out of the blue. She looked at me with ferocious, hating eyes for the first time in my life. Without words, just her intense glare, she forced me to go to my daddy's workshop door. She was breathing real heavily, like she did when she chased me around the house and scooped me up into her arms, and kissed my forehead. This was not one of those times, though. She pointed at the door.
“Go.” She commanded. I never said no to my mama, but I was scared and stuck in her trance again, like I was when Holly was calling out to me. Mama began to walk closer to me, her hand still pointed towards the door, shaking. “Please,” she begged, her face instantly softening, “I can't do this anymore, I'm sorry. They'll take care of you, Holly. They're much better than me. I'm not a good mama. I ruined you.” She then began to cry, and I had never seen her cry before. It was all too much for me, so I twisted the handle and left that house once and for all.
I ran and closed my eyes, because I didn't know what I was going to find in daddy's workshop, and I didn't want to see Holly after all that time being so far apart. I didn't think as to why mama called me Holly, or why she abandoned me after so long. I left mama behind me, and sometimes, if I think hard enough, I can still hear her cries.
What I found behind that door was absolute nothingness, like a dream of black fog, thick and enveloping, not letting me go. Pictures appeared before me, quick and not ceasing. The pictures showed me and mama when I was born in a hospital a long time ago in a place I didn't remember ever seeing. One was of me and her, right when I was born. She looked so happy and at ease. Then, another picture showed mama with another baby, it must have been Holly. What confused me was that she was real blue, and wasn't crying, and mama's face was all contorted in this strange look of horror. I shied away from that picture, it made the anger come up again, the worst it had ever been. I screamed in this strange state of delusion, and that picture was replaced by ones I didn't recognize in the least. Mama was in one of them. She sat in a small cell enclosed with metal bars, and looked completely lost and alone. She looked much older; her once black hair was a shade of silver and her porcelain skin was cracked with age. I wanted to comfort her, to reach out, but that snapshot was then replaced with another picture, of me, with long brown hair, green eyes, and a door behind me. I smiled a goofy grin, and pointed at the name plate by the door. It read, “Holly Stevens.” Then, like a movie clip, it showed me opening that door, looking around a small white room with 54 white squares on the ceiling, sitting on the bed and smiling, then the door slowly closing behind me.
I look up at the ceiling once more. I count. 1, 2, 3, 4... Subconsciously, I knew I had just stumbled upon the truth, but I would never let myself admit it. After all, my name is Todd Stevens. I have beautiful green eyes, the color of emeralds. I'm as quick as a fox and as sharp as a needle. My mama loves me very much. I have a great future ahead of me. I killed my sister, Holly, but mama still loves me. ...51, 52, 53, 54...

It's something about the way my breath
gets just a little deeper when I'm near you.
It's something about the way my eyes
open just a little wider when I see you.
I am happy
to be alive,
I accept life with open arms,
open eyes, and an open heart.
Because I have you;
Because you have me.
And together, I have no fears
and nothing stopping me
from being happy,
nothing stopping me
from loving you or being loved.
Nothing stopping me
from taking on this world,
with your hand in my hand,
and your love in my soul.
With you as my king
and me as your queen,
we will live in the kingdom of our love,
together, endlessly.

The jagged rocks flow through the air like daggers laced with the most toxic of poisons. Adverted eyes avoid the abyss of spewing lava for fear of being burned. Those in the path of destruction, they are the unluckiest of victims. Monosyllabic stones of hopelessness find their way to the scarred skin, bloodying the bloodied, breaking the broken. The volcanoes are worthy of repugnant titles, sharp like their tongues or decaying like their souls. The victims should run, should cry, should lash out against the lava, protect themselves. But everyone says that if you choose to live at the bottom of a volcanic body, you are already dead. The lava will only harden you, despite attempts to remain cool in your passivity. Lava burns, and no amount of composure or preparation can protect you from the overwhelming presence of hatred and intolerance; the hating fire fueled only by oxygen.

You carry me down the hill with the moon
nestled deep within your pockets.
Your warmth resounds deep into my hollow
aura, smoldering in a sweet smoke.
You inject your daily embalming love deep
under my skin, the rivers running white.
You tuck my chin under the railroad tracks
with the careful delicacy of a skilled taxidermist.
There was nothing romantic in the way I faded
to amber, nor in the way your hands
folded into crescents and pulled down a
tiered curtain of blackness, speckled with
the eyes of your descendants.

I find it so simple that a being can lull his or her self to sleep with soothing words of self worth, positive thoughts, or hopeful outcomes for the days ahead. How uplifting it must feel to drift out of the conscious world with all the dreams of the future solidifying in your mind, to only have that mirrored reflection of who you'd like to be become shattered into dismal shards of bloodied memories. The real world, I've found, is not what we experience when we are awake. No, the real world is experienced when the suppressed demons crawl under our skin and barricade our veins while we sleep, insisting upon halting our advances in bettering ourselves, proving to us that we are not as strong as we think.

Now, what about those who do not remember dreams? What do they do that makes them so lucky not to be engulfed in the nightly terrors and reminded on what life truly is, what we're really experiencing? I would never consider them lucky. They are in fact one of two types of people who are of the utmost unfortunate, the first type being those who have not yet realized that they walk hand in hand with their nightly demons in the conscious world. The other type of unfortunate soul is the one who refuses to listen, refuses to garner the insight offered to them, and suppresses yet more memories and thoughts and feelings and emotions and love and hatred until it boils up out of their eye sockets and they have no choice but to take action, whether against their own self or the beings around them.

These people, these souls who reassure themselves of their life's meaning and personal purpose each night, who plaster a smile on their mouths and a twinkle in their eye, they are the ones you should be fearing, for, if they are deaf and blind to their own misfortunes, they are deaf and blind to the world around them. They won't dream about the chaos in their brain or the chaos in society. They won't remember the day you told them they are loved, nor the day you told them they were hated. They will continue to be present in form, but absent in awareness, just as they are absent from their dreams. They will continue on down the dead end road of believing their dreams are what is planned for the future, instead of what has happened in the past. They will never learn to be strong enough to appreciate their nightly demons. They will never be strong enough to appreciate you.

Your hands have seen the inside
of a carborator. You took apart a
hard drive and called it procreation.
They've been blackened by grease and
bloodied in your desperate attempts
to clear the clouds out of your head.
Seattle is our ocean, water all around
to drown away bad memories and forget
the sunshine of our conception.
Rain can cover up scars, hurt, and spilled
ideas, take them far away to different oceans.
But never our own foreign lake, somewhere
close to Mount St. Helens, or so we thought.
Could our hands ever touch such a pure,
uncorrupted pool as holy as the depths
of your eyes? Would it wipe clean the
slate, dirtied over years of poor decisions?
Your cloudy eyes tell me different.

Losing touch without the warmth and life of guiding light,
slow tendrils beckoning your every whisper and sigh of bliss,
coupled hope, unsolitary solitude.

We danced beneath the moon and sang with wolves,
the ancient songs of blackened souls and immortal love,
we felt, but we did not feel.

The moon doesn't burn the way your sun swallows matter,
I exhale only useless thoughts, unable to feed your flames,
windless breathing, shallow thinking.

I can't pry my mouth open with clouded eyes and empty veins,
my stars weren't your sun and I never burnt long enough,
charred eyes and dark memories,
burning brighter than the sun.

I want to watch your lips turn blue,
paint elegies in your flesh with the
purple pumping of your native mind and
crystalline blue depths of your shattered sight.

I want to feel my love constrict your heart,
see the way my words dance beneath your skin
and the morse messages of ardor, true, displayed
in rigid bumps and sunken eyes.

I want to hear your raspy breaths go short,
constrict your airways with my flames and
steal your oxygen, slowly, how lovely, your
cries sound when you can't sigh my name.

I need to touch your icy soul with my
reaching grasp of molten hate, burn love notes
on your ribs of hollow promises and captive
thoughts I'd held so slightly, tightly, won't let go.

shades of hues so dark, yet iridescent, lined the minimalistic realm during the era of the Grays.
each Gray wore gray clothes
ate gray food
thought gray thoughts
and could only think in terms of black and white… and gray.
there were no rules, simply because no one was unhappy with the way things were.
happiness was trivial;
trivial like a pale shade of pink managing to make its way into the spectrum of the Grays
or trivial like the way a Gray would see that pastel and disregard it entirely.
it did not exist.
happiness was trivial, smiles were trivial, balance was necessary.
balance, balance, balance.
order, order, order.
creativity did not exist.
creativity was not a word.
if a Gray’s words had no obvious meaning, they were disregarded, because they were incomprehensible. Words not in terms of black and white were seen as red, seen as blue, seen as green,
but never seen at all.
magnitude.
the magnitude of something’s potential depth was measured by their ability to disregard anything not pertinent to what a Gray should believe.
a Gray must be Gray, must be pensive, must be reserved.
a Gray must be tedious, must be timid, must be poised.
a Gray must be obedient, must be trusting, must be trusted.
a Gray must not see red, or blue, or yellow, or green, or purple, or indigo, or orange,
especially not cerulean or magenta or cyan or mauve or tangerine.
the Grays evolved from Whites, from Blacks
the degenerating masochists of times before
the Grays could not look down, nor up, nor in between, or sideways, or vertically, or around
they could not think what to possibly think of what these people before them may have thought about thinking and thoughts
and couldn’t bear to think about all of this thinking
so the Grays did not think about thinking
they lived for the sake of living
they breathed for the sake of inhaling, exhaling
inhale
exhale
inhale
exhale
inhale
­ exhale
but somewhere
somewhere in that Gray society
a young Gray began to breathe
exhale
inhale
exhale
inhale
and opened his eyes
his blue, blue eyes
and brought thoughts of color
to every Gray’s mind
lightened the world with light
opened the world to chance, to luck, to love
exposed the world to color, to beginnings and ends, to loss, and to destruction
and cried tears of red, of blue, of yellow, of green, of purple, of indigo, of orange,
       especially cerulean and magenta and cyan and mauve and tangerine
flooding the world with possibility
flooding the world with creativity.

You never realize the presence of solitude
until the wind ceases its tirade.
Slow kisses against your skin, raising ideas
and conceiving love in the forms of
dilated pupils and reaching hands.
The comfort in knowing the forces of
the Earth keep our souls breathing
and our hearts teeming, doubled in the
expectation of a solid hand pushing us to
brighter beginnings and sunset endings.
When the wind dies down, all expectations
fall with rotting trees that will never know the
touch of flesh, the warmth of blood dancing
just below the surface of their calloused shields.
Solitude seeks company,
but death seeks us all.

You were simply sunshine in its purest form, and I, simply a shadow, a place where your rays did not reach, a creeping silhouette that trailed after you and grabbed after your own ambitions in bitter hopes to understand you clearer, but to no avail. I knew you, but only because you refused to know me. I thought I understood your motivation in neglecting me after all those months of laughter, but I later understood that what had kindled within me was simply a burial ground for all of your past memories you'd wished to discard somewhere no one else would ever find. I knew you'd forget about me the second you forgot about them, and I was okay with it. I was okay with holding on to your burdens and your troubles and your sorrow if it meant you'd understand happiness for once in life (and even if I was not the one who gave it to you).

i could say a lot of words
but they'd never mean as much as your three do to me
a lot of syllables strung together
with pretty punctuation
like the golden flecks embedded in your eyes
and rhythmic lilts and twirls
like the way we sway together to no music
i could list the reasons
why i stay up too late to talk to you
why i think in terms of 'we' not 'me'
why i would give up a million words for your three
or why i find myself smiling at the mere stupidity i succumbed to
but you know the answer
you know why without need for any words
you know why without need for those three