I want to close my eyes and dream sweet things, to be able to rest eternally without death, a sweet escape from reality, to not have to harbor any fear of the future.

Sleep is beautiful because while I dream, I have no worries. I don’t want to die; I just want to float, and ignore all of the worries of every day life. No thoughts of what could steal my last breath, just the calm and steady rise and fall of my chest.

Comfort, no stress. Resting. Dreaming.

I just want sleep.

She’s the complete opposite of interesting.

Seventeen with dark brown eyes, nearly black as coal. A disaster of beauty, each day is of both fascination and exhaustion.

Chunky combat boots, skinny jeans, mismatched patterned socks, denim vests.
Her thinkspace is drizzled with scraps of papers, numerous pens, and empty cups of Koolaid and coffee. Existing here in her perfect world are columns of literature of all types, books big and small placed wherever they will fit. There is comfort in pen and paper. Sketchbooks are an appropriate place to rest her head. Sleep is the sweetest escape. The written word is a familiar art. Blood of glitter and gold.

Despite her lackluster personality, she is a mystery all in herself.
The quiet type, with a way with words… a walking contradiction, if you will.

She is self destructive.
Timer set, wait for detonation.

“Watch out for this girl, she’s got a gun for a tongue.

I think girls that are afraid to be silly or ungraceful at least every once in a while are kind of repulsive.

How hideous of a life that must be, to try to be completely perfect at all times and to hold a constant fear that people will laugh at you for being anything less.

My mentality is that when people laugh, you laugh too.
How miserable it must be to cower in fear of being made fun of or to be embarrassed.

I swear, some women will turn into devils over an ill-timed or badly angled picture of them.

It’s okay to have people laugh at you, and to laugh at yourself every once in a while.

Live a little.
Everything is much more fun when you’re not being boring attempting to prove to everyone that you’re flawless in every aspect of reality when in reality, you’re only human.

He was new to our class. He had deep skin but the prettiest green eyes and curly light brown hair.

What I remember most about him was every day during nutrition, he would slip me one of his Skippy peanut butter Squeeze Stix. For free, while he charged all the other kids fifty cents.

There was a gated off part of the large playground behind my school, where there was really tall grass. It was gated because the grass was so overgrown that the playground monitors couldn’t see the kids playing in it. Still, there was a secret crawlspace underneath one of the gates, hidden behind an empty bungalow classroom. My friends and I would sneak into it to play in the tall grass; hide and seek, soccer, or to just run in it and let our imaginations go wild.

This day, we were tigers. There were three of us little girls, in our private school collared shirts and navy skirts. I remember us giggling and running from each other, ready to pounce.

After a few minutes, I ran into him.
The green eyed boy from my class, who I’d never really talked to.

“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I smiled.
“Wanna be friends?” he asked.
“Sure!” I thought it was sweet that he took the initiative to be friends. I was glad, because I was shy.
“Let’s play tag,” he said.

So we did.
After a few moments, his friends joined us, and I wondered how they found the secret crawlspace. My friends joined in, too. We all laughed and played and rolled around in the grass. We were having so much fun.

Until the boys started playing too rough.
“We don’t want to play with you guys anymore,” they said, and ran back to the crawl space.
I shrugged it off. I was quite the tomboy back then; I knew how to play rough.
“We can still play, if you want,” I offered.
“Can I ask you something?” The green eyed boy rubbed the back of his neck nervously.
“Yeah?”
“Do you like me?”
“Yeah, you’re a funny boy.”
“No, like.. LIKE me, like me.”
I gave a perfectly normal response. “Well I don’t know you too well yet. And I’m not allowed to have a boyfriend.”
“We should kiss,” he said.
I felt my stomach go a little uneasy. “But I’m only seven. I don’t want to. That’s for grown ups.”
He approached me anyways, him and the other three boys. Suddenly, I felt alone. My friends were long gone. Something clicked in my head and told me to run. I did. “Get her,” I heard him demand as i sprinted for the gate. I was too slow. He shoved me to the ground and got on top of me. All I knew was that I was scared.
I started to scream for help.
“Hold her down,” he told his two friends. They did. Two held down my shoulders and my mouth while the third held down my ankles.

He started to kiss and lick my neck. I could feel the tears streaming down my face and I struggled, hard. He began to grab at my skirt, trying to pull it up but I was wearing shorts underneath.
“Open her legs,” he commanded, and the boy holding my ankles did. I was screaming and crying into the dirty, grubby hands of two little boys as they assisted their friend in doing what he wanted to do.

Just as he was about to pull off my shorts, I heard someone approaching in the grass a few feet away. It was one of the playground monitors.

“Oh shit,” all three of them said, and stood up. It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone my age curse like that.

“What is going on here?!” Her name was Miss Garcia. She was completely horrified. I had to squint my eyes because her vest was such a brilliant shade of neon orange, especially in the sun. I didn’t know what to do. So I hugged her legs as tight as I could, sobbing. My body was shaking and my legs were horrendously itchy from laying in the grass.

“We were just playing actors,” the boy pointed at me. “It was a scene we made up. She was the mom and I was the dad.”
His three friends nodded vigorously in agreement.

“They’re lying,” I cried. “They all held me down while he-” I remembered feeling extremely embarrassed to say the next word because it was so grown up, “-kissed me.”
Miss Garcia’s face contorted into an expression I couldn’t understand.
“Come with me.” She dragged him to the office by his ear but held my hand.

Our parents were called. the police came, too, but I didn’t know why. Suddenly I felt so guilty, wondering if I had gotten the boy into real big trouble.

He was expelled, and that was the end of that. I didn’t know what expulsion meant. All I knew was I was scared and Miss Garcia helped me. She stayed with me in the nurses office until I stopped crying.

I never saw him again.
And I forgot about the whole thing, until now.

It’s funny how you don’t understand certain things until you really grow up.
… I worry for our future generations.

One time

my friends and I got drunk

took the samurai swords on top of my fireplace off of their display

and ran around my house

swords unsheathed

like Naruto

It was epic.

It’s been a while. I’ve been kickin it and smokin and chillin and token on the same couch that we met with, you know, my homie, his lighter, your stories, sure fire. And I stayed here and enjoyed while you smoked and employed more people to your wisdom and I invited more people to my kingdom that no one understood due to sobriety as I sat back and judged society because in turn their judgments were cruel but in my eyes, all judgments are reality.

So fancy me, judge me, judge everyone that doesn’t give a fuck because wherever fucks are given there are never enough for substantiality, no one here believes in reality, because in the morning there’s only silence: no questions of morality. It’s all simple theory, really. How many bitches could a kid screw if a kid could screw bitches, but all these so called bitches are women here.

They’re just lost, looking for their own realities hoping that what they’ve got is enough to avoid future lectures on rationalities.

And that, ladies and gentlemen is the epitome of our youth because no matter what we do, our actions speak the truth.

I’d rather someone tell me that they don’t understand what something is all about rather than someone that thinks they are an artist in all respects that doesn’t have the slightest idea how to dig deep or to construct their own opinions and thoughts.

The only time a human is weak is when they cannot produce for themselves.

If you cannot produce your own ideas, you are nothing but blood, bone, & cells. You cannot be provided the materials to do as you will and simply not do anything.

As the saying goes, an artist can never fail. An artist simply makes mistakes and chooses which ones to keep.

If you never try, how will you know?

We seek symmetry, yet we proclaim that substance is what we covet. Truthfully, we don’t seek understanding or depth; just desperately seeking knight in shining armor mentality, or at least what’s left of it. We try and try to convince ourselves that we aren’t limited to aesthetics, yet with our physical desires, we’re so specific. Our excuse is that we’re a modern society; oh, how scientific, until we discover more “health mysteries” better deemed as human defects, and still we shower them with pity. Pity, in attempts to shadow our shallow ends; but like a toddler at the beach, it’s clear where the sand ends and the void begins. We’re drowning in our own misconceptions of beauty, thinking we know everything when we only look skin deep. But past the blood and bone, there is a home housing our true feelings; our reality. Yet we still remain scarred and scared, because our reality is much shallower than it seems. We want to believe we are passionate, non-judgmental human beings, yet judging is what we’re best at… until it comes to ourselves. Because we’re so busy judging, criticizing, assuming, and patronizing everyone else, that when we finally look in the mirror, nothing has become of us but empty shells. This is our reality.