Into the Arms of Death

And then it all stopped, and she was left suspended in nothingness, trapped in time and space, a prisoner in her own world. Nothing. Nothing but darkness. Nothing but the endless, maddening black that surrounded her, encasing her, holding her up. No light reached her eyes; no sound reached her ears.

"Where am I?" she thought. "Could it be that I'm Alice, in the rabbit hole, or Lucy in the wardrobe?" she pondered a moment, fearless of the horrible dark emptiness. "I see nothing. I feel nothing. Maybe I am nothing?" she asked herself. She was cradled by the cold, yet she felt warm all over. She smiled into the vast space.

A hollow echo called her name. "Who goes there?" she called back, but she made no sound. Her name was called again and fear slowly crept its way into her heart. She couldn't tell which way was up, down, left or right. She began to panic but was unable to move. "Who's there?" she yelled again, but the darkness ate up her words.

She realized what was happening and a tear rolled down her cheek. Her name was called a final time so she closed her eyes, took one last deep breath, and let Death take her away.

Save Me From My Dreams

I'm Carina MacNeil. I'm prone to bad dreams. It's some psyche thing with a big, Latin sounding name, and I have medication for it. The thing about the meds is that they don't always work. Mine don't work often enough that sometimes I don't bother taking them at all. Three days ago, my medicine stopped working entirely. My dreams were getting progressively worse in the weeks leading up to it. For the past three days, I've had the exact same dream. In the dream, I'm in a white room, strapped to a hospital bed, with one bed next to it. There is a girl I don't know laying on it. Neither of us speak, and we are both clad in hospital gowns. The girl next to me looks exhausted, weak, and sickly. I wonder if I look the same way. Then the Voices come. Always the same nonsensical words. Disembodied. I hear footsteps of people who aren't there. I heart a heart monitor that doesn't exist. Then the girl in the bed next to me screams a scream that could make the Sahara freeze over, and blood pours from her arm. Someone is cutting into it, but no one is there. Then I see a cut open up on my arm, but I feel nothing. After sufficient blood loss, everything goes black, and I'm falling, falling, falling, and the hospital gown changes to a red dress with a white apron, and I'm wielding a sword. My arm still bleeds. I land lightly on my feet, which are now inside brown Victorian-style boots, and my skirt billows around me. I'm in a forest. My hair, usually long and dirty blond, is now short and brown. A boy stands in front of me. He's wearing an overlarge shirt, no shoes, and has ratty black hair that covers his eyes. He holds a doll wearing the same dress as me, with the same hair, and a little felt sword sewn onto her hand. I step back, and the boy hums a haunting tune.

“Ichibanme ARISU wa isamashiku ken o katate ni, fushigi no kuni. Ironna mono o kirisutete, makka na michi o shiite itta. Sonna ARISU wa, mori no oku. Tsumibito no you nito jikomerarete. Mori ni dekita michi igai ni, kanojo no sei o shiru sube wa nashi.” He sings slowly. Somehow I know it's Japanese. He puts the doll on the ground and puts a little birdcage over it. A larger one drops around me. I clench the sword tight in my hand and slash at the bars of the cage in vain. I know it won't get me out. It only makes me tired, and the little boy in front of me just giggles and walks away. I scream out of anger, and I watch some bird fly away. I look down at my bleeding arm. The sight makes me want to hurl. Instead I faint, and the scene changes again. I am in a room, still in my “Arisu” clothes. The room has a cement floor, the wallpaper is faded and peeling, there is one window with cracked glass, and an old chair with ripped upholstery. The whole room smelled like weed and meth. And there were the Voices again. The people who aren't there. Echos and shadows of those who had been here in the past. I feel a sharp pain in my back. This pain is what wakes me up. If you are reading this, please help. Every time I wake up, I find another cut, or a bruise. And they don't go away.

Please help me.

I'm going to die.

My dreams are going to kill me.

A Game of Chance

Life is, in all of it's mystery and glory, nothing but a game of chance. A flip of the coin, a roll of the dice, take a number and we'll get to you soon. You may have though of this before. Then again, you may have not. It's chance. Nothing but a twisted and evil, yet fair game. The proverbial double-edged sword, if you will.

It is chance you are reading this. It is chance you are even able to read. Everything in your life can be, or has been decided by a coin hitting the palm of your hand (or the ground, if you're bad at coin flipping). Pick a card, any card. If it's red, you are. If it's black, you aren't. And for most everything in the world, that is how it is. Even Steven, 50/50, yes or no. There is no gray area for almost anything.

You are or you aren't. You do or you don't. You have or you haven't. You will or you won't. There is no in-between. You are a girl, you don't wear glasses, you have broken your arm, you won't die tomorrow. It's chance you look how you look, live where you live, like what you like, do what you do. Your life could have been completely different if that coin landed heads-up instead of down, or your die landed on a four instead of a one. You life may have been altered exponentially by buying that thing you just bought, or reading that book you just read.

But what does all this matter to you? Exactly. It doesn't. Or, maybe it does. What do the tea leaves say about it? The fact is that everything you do, touch, see, hear, and say could, possibly, play a part in your future. It all depends. Depending on what depends on you. You are who you are because of things that you've done. Or thing's people think you have done.

It is chance that I'm writing this. It's chance that I had this thought. Pull a slip of paper out of a hat and do what it says. And what's more, it is chance that anything that ever happened in the past, is happening in the present, or will happen in the future, will affect everything else. And it is all a game. Right and wrong, win and lose. Heavy or light. Do or do not. Balance and chance. Chance and balance. These are the things that make the world go round. Think about it, it's true.

The world, everything in it, everything that's every happened to it, or around it, or inside it, is nothing more than a simple, easy, fair, double-edged, yes or no, do or don't, 50/50, game of chance. You can embrace it, or fight it. Only chance can stop you.

The Closest Thing to "Normal"

She sits at her computer in her bedroom, her stretched and overlong sleeves covering her arms down to her fingertips as she types. And cup that was full of tea now sits empty on the desk beside her bed where she lounges. Her nails coated in chipped yellow paint from something she was going to do a few days previous, but never got around to. She pushes her hair back behind her ears and glances down at the necklace of geeky awesomeness that her best friend had given her. She chews on a crochet hook, staring blankly at the screen in front of her, hearing a song by her favorite band play, but doesn't really listen to it. Her phone vibrates at her side, but she barely notices, and doesn't answer the message.

She goes by many names. Vriska, Madam Red, China, each nickname given at a different time by the same people. She is not an important person, nor is she well known. She knows and relishes this fact. She is just a girl. Someone at the bottom of the food chain. She is an outcast. Nothing more, nothing less, and she finds nothing wrong with this. Her friends, though few in numbers, are closer to her than the friends of those who have reached the top beam of the social ladder, a fact she is proud of. She would hate to be any more regarded than she is already.

This girl is one of many outcasts of her school. And why is that? Because she chooses to be. She decided long ago that being popular was something she didn't want. She embraced the music, the clothes, the subculture of the outcasts, nonconformists, losers and crazies. She shook away embarrassment and threw self-consciousness to the wind. Never once has she regretted her decision, and her life of unpopularity has served her well.

She is the girl who asks for books for Christmas and birthdays. She is the girl who only goes to dances if she gets one of her friends to go with her, then counts how many times she is called a lesbian. She laughs at the skinny girls, the sluts, and the preps. She loves her friends and her life more than anything in the world. She draws anime, watches cop shows, and can have perfectly normal conversations about the reality and significance of the characters she role plays as.

She's crazy. She's a freak. She's an outcast. She's a loser. She's weird. But she's strong. She's a fighter. She's smart. She's fun. She's honest. She's trustworthy. She's a good friend.

But mostly, she's an Outcast. One of many. Unashamed.

Completely True

An unpopular, but really nice, girl takes a really good picture of herself and posts it on Facebook. She gets two likes, and five comments, two of which are really mean comments about her clothes. Another girl who is well-known by everybody takes a bad picture with her cell phone in the girls bathroom at school. She gets twelve likes and fifteen comments, all that say "u r soooo pretty :)" or similar. The first girl saw this and vowed to not take another picture of herself until she figured out how to look like the popular girl.

A guy gets bullied and beat up by some other guys in his class because he's gay. He's gone to the councelor, all of his teachers, and the principal, but they don't do anything about it. His last post on Twitter is "Good bye, everybody." The news in the morning is a story about a teenage boy who "fell, jumped, or was pushed" off the overpass. The story was all over school that day, and the bullies were proud to think it was their doing.

A nerdy girl posts a video on YouTube of herself singing her favorite song. She's an amazing singer, and she's really proud of herself, so she posts a link on every social network she can and waits. The only people who watch the video are her best friend, her family, and her crush. Her friend told her that "I always knew you were a good singer!" That made the girl smile. Her family and crush didn't say anything, but the next day she found the video re-posted on Facebook, with the caption "Look at this loser try to sing!" Her crush had posted it. She immediately broke down in tears.

A boy has no friends because he is condemned to a wheelchair. He was born with one leg, and the other didn't work properly. That was the only thing wrong with him. He was smart, nice, funny, an otherwise perfectly normal kid. His dad had died fighting in Iraq, so it was just him and his mom. Other kids made fun of him because she dropped off and picked up her son at school everyday, and gave him a kiss. They thought it was funny to put sticks in the spokes of his wheelchair. He's homeschooled now, because he told his mom about what happened to him every day.

You laugh, you scoff, but these things happen, and it's horrible. What happened to "All men are created equal"? Does that not extend to young people? What happened to childhood innocence? Where it didn't matter what you looked like, if you gave your cookie to the kid that didn't have one, suddenly you were best friends. I miss that. I miss being able to be who you are and not being laughed at or made fun of for it.

The Infamous Glass

Now you might think the glass is half full, and you might think that the glass is half empty, but engineers know that the glass is actually two times larger than it needs to be. Politicians on the other hand have assured me that the glass would be MORE empty if the opposition were in charge, while surrealists think that the glass is half of a slowly rotting lemon. Physicists, well they happen to know that you can never know exactly how much water is in the glass because just by measuring, you have changed the outcome. Leroy Jethro Gibbs is suspected to dust the glass for prints to see who drank his water and my mother has told me that the glass is always full because regardless of how much water is in it, air takes up the rest of the space. I'm Cheyenne Corrick and I approve this message.

Addison Reed: Agony

“Hey, Addison!” My brother Kevin called. I immediately ran to my room. I was 10. I knew what was coming. Five years ago, Kevin had gotten into anarchy and biochemical weapons and a bunch of other things that made the house smell like sulfur. But most notable, he liked alchemy. And I was his lab rat. The first thing he ever did to me was test the acidity of certain things he’d created and their reactions to human skin. I have chemical burns all up my back from that. I was six at the time.

The next time, I was nine. He was testing an airborne chemical by locking me in my room and snaking a line under my door. I coughed until I couldn’t breathe, and the room was filled with a faintly pink smoke. I passed out from lack of oxygen, my brother aired out my room, and set me in my bed. I woke up a few hours later with a massive headache. When he came back in to check on me and see what his experiment had done, all he could do was stare. My eyes had changed. One was red, one was purple, and they could see more than light. I saw into Kevin’s mind. For the next week, Kevin’s only project was fixing it. He never did really fix it, but he made me a special pair of glasses that kept me from seeing into peoples’ heads. It was probably the nicest thing he ever did for me.

Since then, I had ingested dozens of chemicals and toxins, been injected with viruses and drugs, but never once did Kevin unleash the pink smoke. Most of this was by force. I always had a bruise from either Kevin or my dad beating me. My mom was never around. I was the youngest, and the only girl. I was practically bait.

This brings us to now. Ten years old, cowering in my closet under a coat.

“Addy…” Kevin cooed. He walked quietly into my room and tore the coat off me. I screamed. He grabbed my arm and stuck a needle into it. Whatever he injected me with burned like fire as it coursed through my body. He smiled maliciously at me as my eyes rolled back and I went limp in his grasp. He let me fall back in the closet. He was timing how long it would take me to wake up.

He was kind of a sadistic bastard.

Deep Thinks

So, I’ve got a guy friend who I usually refer to as my kismesis. We’re hate friends. He is practically my bitch, I can seriously make him do… Just about anything I want. And under normal circumstances, I HATE communicating with him by any other means than face-to-face. But occasionally, I humor him and talk to him via internet.

This was the case this morning. I was talking to him about spirit week and how (even thought they changed it to “hawaii day”) we’re doing transgender day, in which we all dress extremely girly because none of us are. And so, this guy, he pretty much lost every shred of dignity he ever had over the course of half an hour, because we were seeing what of my clothes would fit him. We eventually settled on an outfit that consisted of a long black skirt, a flowery tank top, and a purple sweater.

This morning he was telling me about how he didn’t want to wear it to school. He was wussing out. The rest of the conversation doesn’t matter much, because it was at this point I started to wonder, why is it socially acceptable for girls to wear guyish clothing, but not for guys to wear girlish clothing?

This branched off into a lot of gender thoughts, and I started really noticing how much our society today separates male and female. I didn’t do this on purpose, but when something is on your mind for an entire day, these things tend to happen. But I noticed more about what girls and guys wore and did and said and how everything was so different.

And then I looked at us. Me and my friends. We call ourselves the Pack. We aren’t very girlish or boyish, with the exception of one of our newest friends and the guy I was talking to this morning. But we kind of stand in the grey area. We are the line. And I thought, hell, why do I identify as a girl? What, besides my anatomy, makes me female?

I was thinking about this most of the day. It dawned on me that once, when I was joining a website, the gender thing said “Male, Female, Other” and I didn’t know what other meant. My aunt told me that some people don’t identify either way. Today, that finally made sense to me.

It is not what chromosomes we have that define us as a boy or a girl. It is what we do, and say, and how we dress and act, and the things we like. Our biology does not make us the person we are. WE make us the person we are. I knew this previously, but suddenly it has a whole new world of meaning to me.

And I decided, fuck, I’m not a boy. But I’m not really a girl, either. I’m much girlier than most guys, but must more boyish than most girls. By any standards that are not scientific, I am not either. I am a person. I stand on that line between male and female. And why the fuck should I identify myself as one or the other, when it’s very clear that I’m not one or the other? I am other. I am the in-between. I am the line. I am me. And dammit if I’m not going to label myself.

So there you have it. I am gender-fucking-neutral, and not about to change.