Where did it go? My happiness, my serenity. What do I need to do to find it again? Life has been stressful, but it could be worse. I recognize that every day. From October until June, I’ve been grappling with trying to find my place on the new campus I am on. How do I fit in, and does it really matter? It doesn’t matter, but at least in the tiniest form, it does because of how it’s affected me. I have less shared experiences, and less experiences to share with others. I have less time to engage in creative tasks, like writing, drawing, and singing, my driving forces. When I write, it’s for class. It is analytical in the worst way possible for most of my assignments. When I draw, it’s a doodle to get me through class. When I sing, it’s in my room and never on stage. Where did it all go? My passion. The breaks never help completely, but I have been writing more. It feels good to be back at it again. I’ve found a little happiness, a little serenity, and a spark of passion. Maybe taken altogether, I’ll find even more...

The room is all cleaned up,

But now am bored again, nothing to take up my time,

Except for the memory of you

All I try fails, and with it breaks my heart

I used to put pen on paper; but that was a long time ago

Even that has come to be my nightmare.

I can’t stand the thought of you not being here

The papers look at me with longing

Eager for the ink in my pen to fill their blankness

And it haunts me

But I cannot and will not, write pieces that I know not the destiny of.

Maybe you will never set eyes on them,

Or worse, if you do you will not understand them as you once did.

This dawns on me every time I pick up my pen-

My hands go frail with the dread of the unknown

I don’t know

I don’t want to know;

The reality may break me down

And you won’t be there to pick me up

The dreams and hopes that we shared are no longer

The promise you made of your eternal presence was a fallacy

The lapse of time may have dried from your face the wetness of youth

When words spoken carried meaning

When promises were more than whispers in the air

And our hearts believed in what our lips beckoned

You may now be another,

One that I know not.

Life may have filled your mind with brutal truths

Ones to make you forget the simplicity we once exuded.

I don’t wish to think about it, but I do.

Hence I will not write to you.

Least not till I believe again

With every stroke of ink on this paper

My hopes fade and I am left with loss

I have lost

The only thing that once made some sense in my life

The only thing that gave me a reason to be

He saw his life evaporate before his eyes

In one short sentence.

“We have reason to believe…”

He didn’t hear the rest.

This man of peace,

This gentle giant,

This loved and lovely man.

His wife and daughters came downstairs

Awash with disbelief.

With handcuffs on, they led him out to the waiting unmarked car.

His job,

His church,

His many friends,

Would suffer through his actions.

He grieved for them; the pain he would cause them when they heard of his arrest.

And the reason for it.

One small action, on one dark night

So long ago.

He hadn’t intended harm,

But taken by surprise, forgot his own strength.

One punch

In the dark,

So long ago.

He saw his life evaporate before his very eyes.

And felt relief.

For he was a good man,

This man of peace,

This gentle giant.

And the burden was now lifted from his shoulders

And from his mind.

And he was a good man.

This is an sample from a novel I'm writing.

I started to climb the stairs. The blood stains trailing the light-colored carpet was also not a good sign. I checked the bathroom right off the top of the stairs. Bloody handprints coated the white porcelain sink. At this point, my stomach was so heavy that it practically touched my toes. I followed the blood trail out of the bathroom. It ended at John and Judy’s bedroom door. The door creaked as I slowly pushed it open. The sickening smell of death was particularly strong in here. This wasn’t going to be good.

I saw her in the corner, slumped over in a sitting position. I stood still. The dead one slowly raised her head, making a low groaning sound. Like she was in pain. Tears welled in my eyes. No. Judy slowly rose from her spot in the corner. Time was moving in slow motion. Judy had been hugging a stuffed animal, one of Ariella’s, no doubt. It hit the floor as Judy outstretched her arms in my direction. She sniffed the air and clamped her teeth. I could see a single bite mark on her upper right arm. She was getting closer and closer but I couldn’t move. I was frozen, again. This time though, I had an overwhelming sense of sadness. Judy and her husband moved in when Ariella was only one year old. We had many block parties and cookouts together over the years. I had babysat Ariella all the time. It wasn’t fair. Tears burned my eyes as Judy got within arms-reach. Instinct took over and I quickly moved out of her way. I hadn’t made a sound and could barely breath. My movement must have confused her because she stumbled. She looked around aimlessly, sniffing the air. Her milky eyes landed on me several times before she even turned my direction. Wasting no time, I swiftly kicked her legs out from under her, copying the move Mike had made earlier. I had knocked her on her back. This didn’t seem to faze her. I brought my hunting knife into her eye socket hard. It took quite a bit of force to push it in far enough. When the handle touched her face, she stopped moving. No one had prepared me for how difficult this could be. When I was finally safe, I let the tears flow.

When you write a story, it is supposed to be believable, verisimilar. But true life does not make any sense and cannot be held to that standard.

For the third day in a row a new student, Sara, is in my class with her head buried in her arms on her desk and her white hoodie wrapped around everything but the spiked hair on the top of her head. In a regular high school, she would be getting dirty disgusted looks, but this was an alternative high school and the students were tolerant and gave her space. I finally asked her if she did this all the time or if she was having a bad day or a bad week or a bad year or a bad life or what was going on. She stood up, strode out of the room and slammed the door behind her. The remaining students just shrugged their shoulders and smirked when I told item I was going to find her and talk with her.

I found her outside sitting on a bench and I sat down beside her. She looked at me and glared.

“Why are you sitting there looking at me like that? Why don’t you leave me alone?”

“Because I think what every pretty young lesbian girl needs is a sixty five-year-old man to listen to her.”

This confused her for a while, but since I just sat there and didn’t leave she decided to talk.

“At my other school, this boy looked at me funny so I just walked up to him, punched him in the face and knocked him to the ground. Now I’m on thirteen pills a day to control my ADD and bipolar and whatever other shit they think I have. My mother is a mean bitch and sometimes I’m fucking afraid of what she is going to do, especially when she’s drinking. She says I should try dressing and acting like a girl and not like an ugly dyke. I had a girl friend but she was an even crazier bitch than me, so here I am. Now you know everything about me and you can go back and teach your boring ass class and breathe on everyone with your nasty coffee breath and pretend you like everyone just like you’re pretending now.”

“Please don’t punch me. I’ve been punched before and it hurts,” I answered. I think I saw the faintest beginnings of a smile on the corners of her mouth.

We both sat there a while and neither one of us moved.

“My life is nonsense. I hate my life,” she said softly.

So I decided to try giving her a pep talk. I told her I had absolute faith in her ability to start doing well in class, to get enough credits and graduate. I asked her to think about obstacles she had faced in the past

I told her that if you think your nonsense story is unique, just search on the internet and another one just like it will pop up. There are thousands of girls taking meds for ADD who have mean mothers and lost their girlfriends. And there are thousands out there like me who give stupid speeches or do the same stupid thing over and over or experience the same odd set of circumstances or feel attracted then rejected then uncomfortable then embarrassed. There are thousands of people experiencing the same feelings, surviving the same odd circumstances, feeling alone and neglected. I told her what she was going through was about the whole human experience. You might think you’re one human all alone in the world, but you’re really not alone at all. If you’re young and lonely, old and confused, ugly, skinny, fat, gay, straight, loved, rejected, hey! don’t worry there are thousands more just like you. Just be strong, have faith in yourself and things will get better.

It was such an inspiring speech that Sara got up and walked away.

She walked away and never came back to our school. Instead, she found a bad self-medication habit and a way to support it. Over a period of two years she lost twenty pounds. Sores broke out on her face.

I saw her at Walmart one day. Her hair was stringy. She smelled bad. The clothes she used to fill out hung on her like a clown suit. She asked me if I could spare five dollars. I gave her ten. I don’t even think she knew who I was. She gave me a weak smile and headed out the door.

Sara just sold meth to support her habit. She was small time. So small time, she might have gone unnoticed. But her ex girlfriend wasn’t so small time. When she got caught, she offered to narc a bunch of others out in exchange for staying out of prison.

So Sara got a knock on her door one night and spent a month in the county jail. Her so-called public defender recommended a plea deal. This got her two and a half years in prison.

I love that feisty spiked haired girl.

Author’s note: Sara is not a real person. She is a composite character, similar to several girls I knew. All of the things in the story really happened, but not all of them happened to the same person.

She wanted to write fiction. Fantasy, sci-fi...anything else. But all she could write was her truth. All that connected her to the world, to others, seemed to be her pain. That story about being a young girl, her mind so much more developed than her body, and her friend's father...touching her in ways that made her feel strange. Confused and hurt yet not hurting. Not at first, anyway. That was popular.

And then the story about the boy in high school. Who followed her to her afterschool babysitting job. Touching her in that same way, but rougher, more insistent. Who did things to her that she had learned about in health class. She told her mother, and her mother made her quit her job. The guilt and shame...it never went away. That story was popular also.

In fact, all the stories about her body being used, abused. Beaten and brutalized. All of those stories were popular. It hurt so much to write them. It was confusing how people enjoyed reading them. As if she hadn't lived them. As if they hadn't been real. And maybe, that was exactly the problem. Maybe it all sounded made-up. Like fiction. So people transformed her tragedy to her creativity in their minds.

But every word was real. And she lost the desire to feel. So she lost the desire to write. She couldn't write anything else...the only thing that wanted to be released was her sadness. Her emptiness. Her lonliness. Her desolation.

After a while, her tears stopped forming words. Her mind stopped trying to process the pain. But she kept living through story after story. When she was writing, the experience was like a bullet to the heart and the story...that was the exit wound. Once she stopped writing, she was still getting shot...but now there was no exit wound. They lived inside, infecting her. Brought her to the point of no return.

The last thing she ever wrote was her suicide note.

"With a heavy heart, we gather here today..."

“Where does the time go?” was all she could ask herself.

It had been two and half years ago, that she had been given her diagnosis of ALS, as much as it seemed like an eturnity, it seemed like yesterday.

She had already gone through the denile, anger, sadness, went back to anger, never really wanting to accept that it would be her fate.

She had so many decisons that had to be made when she found out, because the disease can progress quickly, she had to decide if there would be an NG tube- to help her eat, a ventilator- to help her breath. Of course none of these thing would save her or really give a better quality of life, just give her more time.

Her daughter had moved up the wedding date, so that she could be there to see her. Although she had to attend in a wheelchair, she was happy that she was able to go and be there, but it also filled her with sadness that she would not meet her grandchildren.

As the year progressed, she lost more and more ability to do much for herself, a woman who rarely asked for help from anyone, was now reduced to being able to do little, without the help of someone else.

She use to run, play tennis, go to yardsales, and dinner with friends, but those things, like her body faded into memories as it became far more difficult to move around with ease, and her breathing had become worse.

When she was admitted to hospital, she could no longer walk, or barley swallow, and her breathing was so laboured that medication and oxygen were not much help. She would stare at the ceiling, clinging to the shell of her old self, waiting forcibly patient for the end to come. She would go to the times in her life that brought her joy, her wedding day, the birth of her daughter, running on the boardwalk, an anniversary trip to Costa Rica, and times with friends.

The time was long now and the life she thought about, seemed distant.

She could hear her family around the room, but was unable to move her head to see them. Her family was crying around her, she was fading, the ceiling seemed to come closer, she tried to keep her eyes open, but they kept closing, then they wouldn't open.

She could feel herself break free of her body and feel herself rise above the bed and her family in the room. They were upset, crying - she wanted to tellthem not o worry that she was better now, but she couldn't, she only rose higher to an unlnown destination, now sepreate from the pain and sorrow that she had carried for the last two and half years.

#Make Me Cry My Heart Out

@Tohru

The stereo plays somewhere in the background of the old house, pushing out the sound known as Metallica. The room isn't completley dark but the details are hard to make out. She sits rigid on the bed, rocking slightly as her mind spins into oblivion. Memories of days that have gone by and thoughts of times that will never exist zoom through her broken mind. Her body works overtime to digest the poison as it seeps from her uncleansed pores. "Remember to put gloves on before you touch the baby." Is the last thought that occurs. She twitches once, she twitches twice and now she's on the floor. Her skeletal-like body convulsing into a massive seizure. Maybe this is what she wanted, what she dreamed of as a little girl. Not owning her own home, not marrying the man of her dreams but riding the white picket fence to her own horrific death as her baby screams in the next room.

I’ve got a pay-per-view pussy.

Sex on demand.

I open my hot flesh to you,

dripping with the pineapple juices, word has it, enhances flavor.

When we fuck I dream of others

because I crave your jealous thrusts.

But the stars that burst between my eyelids and the room always bring me back to you.

A war lingers above;

In time i'll escape it.

Toward safety i run , toward safety i run;

Trying not to remember where i've begun.

All that I feared I'd lose, washed away;

Droplets kiss the ground, and bruise without a pound.

A dim gray cover sways me;

For I like the colorless dress.

I dance in heavy motion;

Swirling and twirling a lover's potion.

A vicious tonic usurps the damned;

A striking revelation stands.

I wish you light in the darkness;

You pour constantly;

Till I'm disheartened...