Written words have never come on my command. Sometimes though, they slip from my lips to a page leaving a taste sweeter than anything else. I wish it was easier, the spoken word drops from my lips too fast to catch by most. But coherence comes rare for poetry, rarer for fiction. Descriptions leave me with warmth, but dialogue and characters escape from my mind longe before I can ever write them down.

As for essays, my words slough onto the pages. They ramble and tumble to the speed of my thoughts, tangling into thorn bushes on dry earth. Days later I come back to my garden. I unsnarl the confusion I left, and plant daffodils, crocuses, snowdrops among the vines. I arrange them in a comprehensible chaos of health and fertilizer. A beautiful kind of clarity. Then I leave them for someone else to tend, maybe I’ll one day come back. Maybe I will not.

Sometimes I think I’ve lived to long to be unsure.

Sure that my 15 years allow for certainty!

At least…

that’s what I wish for.

I wish for constancy.

I’m afraid of change, yet change is all I am.

It’s all anyone is at my age,

stuck in the middle of their very first crisis.

“Who are we?” We cry. “What do we want and why?”

And I think I know.

That is until the clock strikes midnight

and everything pours out again, ideas all over the floor.

I’m searching for a label, searching for a place where I feel at home.

I’m so confused by the world I’m defined by it.

The only labels that stick have to do with a lack of something,

my confusions so stuck in that they become my identity.

Asexual

Aromantic

Agender

Atheist

I think I am all of these things, and yet am I?

Will I one day understand?

I’m not sure.

And isn’t that the crux of it!

Sleek strands of ink fell back away from its face, swishing, swirling down like rivers or waterfalls, blacker than black, a void almost blue in tint, an ocean of sorrow. Flint grey eyes accopanied, harsh, accusing in their stare, surrounded by lashes like forests of seaweed. Horrible, but entrancing, its face seemed ageless,and murky, as if surrounded by shadows. The few wrinkles upon its brow from displeasure like chasms, endlessly dissending. Enormous wings dwarf its gauntness even folded down to its back as they are now, a few shades darker than its eyes, and full of constallations. It’s dressed in robes lighter than its wings, a steely grey. They’re long and a misty hand raises itself to you, a silent question. You can feel those eyes bearing into your skull, daring you to disagree, so you take its hand, accept your fate. As it sweeps you into a dance, the last you’ll ever know, you feel yourself fading. Thoughts fainter, peace rising. With a final spin, you are gone, the angel is left swaying alone to music no one can hear.

The purple pulsing behind your eyes started a while ago. Pounding at your temples it hounds you, its crashing ringing in your ears. A violin accompanies it, screeching to the din inside your head as the lights above you seem to grow ever brighter. You can almost feel the contusions forming from the sounds alone, masses of blue-black on your skin, tarnishing your face with their bleak marks, adding to the ones left by the scratch of fabric that set you on fire, everyday clothing turning against your body.

I’m 15, and I have an imaginary friend, but only kind of. She’s the by product of my need to feel comforted by someone when I’m feeling low and my reluctance to do so out of fear of worrying my friends and family. Her name’s Elizabeth. That’s my birth name too, and sometimes she comes along with Elijah, who IS me in my head all my thoughts and logic and reason when I need it, and I am Betsy (my widely known nickname) and only the worst kind of raw emotions. It’s the strangest thing. I split apart into all my aspects so I can feel like I’m being hugged, so the tears will finally come. I even do voices for them sometimes out loud, and they sound different. It’s like they’re the only ones I trust not to hurt because I know they are fake. I know that I could catch a bullet just to prevent my sister’s tears. I care for people so much I can’t tell them things, but carry what they give me and try not to let it spill over. And now seems like a good time to even say what I tell the imaginary mes. I tell them that I hurt and I don’t why. It’s mental, completely so, but it’s there, and I want it to disappear, I want to disappear to go where I don’t hurt anymore. I tell them I’ve thought of all the ways it could happen too. Detailed plans that I’ll never follow through on because I hate pain. And I know I’m not being eloquent today but I thought that this would be a good thing to say anywhere. I’ve only ever told my family and a few select friends and I couldn’t even say the words aloud I had to write them down because my lips sealed themselves, and they don’t know about Elizabeth and Elijah. Also, this is the only form of social media I have if it even counts at all. Thanks for your time.

Pain comes in an ever shifting shade. From purples of wines that men drowned in, and the browns of their beer to the blue of frostbite, and the red of blood, pooling on the floor. The color contains the shine of a knife and the glint of a gun. It’s the color of screams that have melted all over the floor like orange candle wax, and the silent gasps that come after being struck in their sickenly pretty pale purple. It’s the green of bile and muck and the brown of the graveyard dirt that burns a hole in the heart. And every single shade is swept over with the hazy sheen of unshed tears glistening in the eyes of someone precious, and carries the weight of a cancerous secret never to be revealed

Long ago humans were afraid of fire. Afraid of the droughts that came and the heat that scorched, and the way forests burned to ashes among the roaring of the red light, and afraid of searing flesh curving easily away from bone. By the Elizabethan era we were still afraid. Of our cooking being the end of us as smoke collected in rooms and we all suffocated, of our chimmneys not working of another family home, burning next to ours. And even today I quake. We have alarms for smoke. We have vents for steam, but the pain of burns is like nothing else.

There are eight bones in the wrist

19 in each hand

5 Metacarpals

14 Phalanges

These are fundamental facts.

Like the sky is blue

Because light scatters.

On its way to earth

Things to hold onto tightly

When the world is cruel

When things are changing

Shifting beneath your feet

Things I whisper in the dark

When I am afraid

For they are my truths.

And I cling to them

So I curl up whispering

These truths to myself

The sky is still blue.

The truth is still truth

There are eight bones in my wrist

38 in my hands

10 metacarpals

28 Phalanges

The glinting masks covered the room, a grinning array. For me it was easy to picture the faces that these would cover. The people trying to hide under what they are exactly not. That one a malicious brunette with a harsh grating smile and eyes hard as ice hiding behind an elaborately gilded mask. One made to help her appear charming so she could better manipulate. This one for an aging man pretending to be crippled for his own gain, hair silvering, hiding behind a mask with extra wrinkles painted on, eye holes lined with marks of pain. Each made for a singular individual and malleable to their every need. Each mask was made for misdeed. The laughing eyes and rosy cheeks they possessed were for lies, fabrications. What a masquerade when they were gathered! All types of untruths gathering, dancing gaily! And mine among them. Donning its mask of sunset colors. Standing out so it would blend in. Perfect for a thief. You'll never see me coming until I'm standing in front of you, inquiring for a dance. You have your untruths too after all, and I'm sure they're dying for a spin.

Their eyes were the first thing people notice about them, physically that is. The colors of ice with a ring of the blackest sea. Then the nose, prominent in the face, and a pair of lips, full and solemn, until they upturned in an elvin smile, ears pointier, teeth showing, joy beaming from their face, as they said, voice cheery, “Hello, I’m Elijah. What’s your name?” Putting forth their best foot for strangers. As people got to know them however, the false facade dropped, and their smile became more real and their hands flitted about as they ranted passionately about something or another. Likely science, as before anything else that was their subject of choice. They loved to rattle off names of bones, show off a bit, talk about the loves that they held for biology, for chemistry, for physics. They were a joy to watch.