I thought I hated all mortals.

In my mind they were foolish creatures, weak and insufferable, ugly and greedy, pathetic and argumentative. They were the race bearing a lack of compliance or acceptance for another's differences. Seeing the perspective or point of view of a person standing right next to them was a feat that didn't come naturally and a skill far too few achieved. They were quick to wage war, but quicker to beg for their meaningless lives.

Such a being was too easy to kill, off a whim.

I stopped trying to understand mortals long ago, so on a particular fateful day, I didn't question why an infant mortal was left alone in a dessert, unmonitored and defenseless.

Its wailings were faint. Had I not been a superior race, I would have flown past it without realizing. Instead, off a whim, I descended towards it.

I remember the wailing stopped once my claw reached the sand. I had never seen one that small before. My wings curled around the creature - call it predatorial instinct. The sunlight cast a faint red shadow through the thin of my wings and against their curious little eyes. Its sun-tanned hand stretched away from its strangled blanket and out for me; an empty threat, one I chose to ignore.

I stooped down to its level and the first thing it decided to do was reach for my hair, pulling the red strands in tiny bunches - as I said before, 'quick to wage war'. I grabbed it by the wrist and raised it up high for a better display. It fainted. On another whim I decided to bring it back with me.

I thought once it reached my den I'd want it dead, but it intrigued me with its strange behaviour, making bubbly scream-noises anytime it saw something new. I fed it and decided to keep it around. It wasn't like the other mortals I hated so much, this one possessed a certain light.

It gave me a thought.

What if I nurtured this light? What if I grew it in a way that could improve the species from within?

So I did. I became a sort of mother, or father perhaps - I forgot what they were called.

It grew fairly quickly and I grew used to its company. So used to it, in fact, that I found myself preoccupied with needless thoughts on its safety, its wellbeing, and its joy. I grew fond of its expressions when I took it for a fly. I had to protect its bubble-scream, and its gentle, constant, expression changes. I had to give it more reasons to latch its arms around me. I had to make sure it wouldn't wail and leak through the eyes in that awful way mortals do.

I paid attention to the many, many things that could cause its demise. Since falling over could cause it to bleed, anything greater than that was a threat. I hated this. This threat-list made me do crazy things; like take the full force of an attack to shield it from harms way, or dive into a lake that naturally seeps my energy to prevent it from drowning, or beg...

beg other mortals to spare its targetted, fleeting life in exchange for the immortality of mine.

My tears would be pink.

Why?

Because I believe that's a fitting colour that works with the word random.

As well as a colour I hate. Pink is bright and out there, acting as an unnatural attention-seeker. My tears are on equal standing in terms of eye-drawing unpleasantness.

I have pink tears that don't know what they're doing. I belive when my body was being constructed, something went wrong and my tear glands got screwed over in the process.

So I cry when I'm too happy,

When I'm too sad

When I'm too angry

or too scared

When it's too windy

or I'm too embarrassed

too shocked

or too stressed.

The worst one among these ongoing, never-ending, soul-sucking, garbage-eating, pointless, useless, dumb, unnecessary emotions, are angry tears. Imagine being furious and pink liquid is spewing out of you. No one will take you seriously. Your personified cause-of-anger will more likely think 'Aw, boo hoo, I made you sad' rather than 'Oh Fluff, I pissed her off!' Then, next thing you know, you're there sitting in the back cry-corner of your workplace hell with these homicidal thoughts and bedazzled pink fluids cascading - ever so delicately - down your cheek.

Not. That. This. Happened. *slamming keyboard*

Point is: my tears are FLUFFING annoying! And once I start I can't stop. It takes about 5 - 10 wasted minutes of my life, trying to reconfigure my tear glands to obey my every command.

Over oceans searching for love that's true

From nowhere appear across my view

Travel miles inside your shoe

Now stuck like glue

Unable to undo

So into

You

Okay, so this is definitely going to sound at least a little lame, but here goes.

It was around New Year's last year. I'd just gone through my first break-up with a guy I really liked (and, well, that came back to haunt me, but that's another story), and I was just sorta having a tough time, because teen drama and angst and all that. It was fun.

So, I was lying awake one night, and I just had a ton on mind. I wanted to vent really bad, but nobody was awake, so I was just on my own to steam and feel awful. I ended up picking up a pad of Discovery Channel-brand note paper and just venting on there to myself. You know, though, you get lazy and you just write fragments and stuff when you're writing on paper, so that's what I did. I got pretty into it. I experimented a little with rhymes and then was all "naw", and I wrote my first poem. It was a basic free verse thing called "My Mistress is Loneliness". It was pretty melodramatic, as younger me was (and present me is), but I was proud of it.

I wrote a few more, and it was a bit easier to sleep then, so I did. The next morning I discovered my first writing community platform: Teen Ink (which I now sort of have a love-hate relationship with). I posted my poems there. They didn't get any fanfare or anything on the site, but I felt really, really proud of myself for putting myself out there.

Suddenly, I started carrying a notebook with me everywhere. I wrote and posted some more stuff, and I even entered a few poetry competitions (which I lost, but again, still fun).

And, well, that was when I figured out that I wanted to be a writer. One thing led to another, and now I'm here. It felt like my whole life just unfolded in front of me after those first few poems. I finally realized what I wanted to do with my life.

Still haven't written anything that good, but I'm getting there. And I'm still content with that.