"Fey, it is Christmas today."

I turned on the torn wrapper I had laid on the floor and glanced into the tired eyes of my brother. He sat on the bare floor with his legs crossed. His ten-year-old body looked like a beaten-down forty-year-old's. I am sure I looked worse than he did.

I looked around and noticed that it was still dark. Several other people were clustered around, some asleep, others sitting and staring into space. The putrid scent of alcohol and cigarettes clung to the air like a leech, refusing to come off.

“Why are you awake?” I asked, returning my gaze to my brother.

“Because it is Christmas.”

“Okay?”

He remained silent, obviously lacking an answer to my obvious question. His inability to answer must have upset him, because the next thing I saw was tears in his eyes.

I climbed to a sitting position and looked at him worriedly.

“What is wrong?”

He refused to answer, instead giving the tears permission to fall. I stayed there, glued to the floor, staring at the only family member I have in the entire world.

“Okay, okay,” I said, trying to pacify him. “Merry Christmas.”

He turned to me and smiled. I smiled back in return.

“Today will be different," he said. “It is Christmas.”

We had spent the last ten Christmases together, and it had never been different, so I wondered what he thought was going to be different about the day. It wasn’t until later, when his body was laid down into the cold ground, that I realized just how different that Christmas was.

Finally, he was free. He got a gift.

“Merry Christmas,” I whispered, trying in vain to hold back the tears.

It’s a silencing, numb embrace.

My feelings fade, and I yearn for that moment to break from the emptiness.

P.s.

I'm pretty open about my battle with severe depression. I want to be strong and show everyone that you can still progress through a mental illness. Lately, I'm having a rough go of it, and to put it into simple terms: it sucks. I'm unfocused, unmotivated, and, most of all, don't even feel like a person at times. I'm a ghost, just floating around the house.

Anyway, to try and break free from my numbness and try to recuperate, I've started working on a novel when I feel down about someone in my position. This way, I'm able to get my feelings out and work at the same time.

Trees flutter, whisper stories of time.

He wandered, lost, grasping broken memories.

Anguish holding his cold wrinkled hand.

What does a wordsmith do? We take words, place them on an anvil and hammer them to do our bidding. We heat or cool them to make them pliable and hard. We use them like glass to cut to the core. We use them like raindrops to soften a blow. We take words and merge them with other words thus creating a new bridges to close the gaps. Most of all the wordsmith uses words to shout out "Here I am world."

A wordsmith is a person who can craft words into both delicate sweet flowers and piercing metal swords.

Someone who can craft their words into both fire and rain.

They can make you feel loved, or they can make you feel hate. They can make you feel alive they can make you feel as if you wanted to die.

But most important of all, they can help change minds, hearts, and souls. Even if it is just though a work of fiction.

A wordsmith can both take a life, and save a life.

The pen, and the sword are in their hands.

Describe my what to you? A little personal for a first date, don't you think? I mean seriously, what's your height and weight? How about I bear my soul to you, slam it down on this table, let you meander through it, here's a few pages of my journal when you get to it.

What do you mean I started this? This isn't my conversation.

Oh, my writing, describe my writing is what you're saying.

Well it's a little all over the place if I'm being honest. It's a lot like late night conversations with strangers who don't have any faces.

"Check please."

Once upon a time, there was a young girl. She was quite odd and passionate about unusual things. She loved to write-- and that was where she kept all her strange ponderings, never sharing. She met a man. The most beautiful and spellbinding creature she had ever encountered. She had no idea that kinds such as these existed.

They began their friendship with written correspondence. They discussed the deepest of topics, always the things that were steeped in their minds, mired in their marrow. She learned his joys and his hurts. What he lived for and that for which he'd die. She glimpsed his soul and soon fell deeply in love with him.

He, on the other hand, did not love her. She was like a curious sea shell that he happened upon. One he picked up, turned over slowly in his hands, examined closely, marveled at the uniqueness... and then promptly threw it back into the roaring sea. It was interesting enough, but it lacked his prerequisitional aesthetic qualities that would have made it a keeper. As she sank into the deep and the strong currents took her away, the man continued to walk, perusing the shell-littered beach.

Much time passed. Hindsight took his handsome face in both her hands and offered him a clearer perspective. He sought out and eventually found the girl he disregarded. She still loved him deeply. He gave her the nickname "Mazzy". And to this day, she still writes to him from her odd and passionate perspective.