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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guess your just a special recessive alien like that.