I am a dreamer, but not the kind you're thinking of. These dreams do not chase the infinite charms of the universe, they do not seek to uncover more splendour beyond our vision although they exceed the realities I am accustomed to. These dreams encompass unique powers capable of transporting you to  other-worldly spaces that still somehow possess an overwhelming familiarity despite simultaneously being so alien. These dreams distort what you think you know holding an illusory mirror up against your existence, commanding you to look at the crooked reflection that is you and is not. The things I experience within them I feel too human handle. Each night the light in my eyes dims a little more. The weight of this lingering sense of wrongness swells as I shrink, like a parasite is crawling within my mind and stealing strength at my souls expense. This world is flowing with undercurrents of darkness that is unconsciously overlooked in the scurry of a frantic race towards nothing, attempting to cram each moment with distraction, remaining occupied and oblivious. But in sleep, I am alone and I am vulnerable. I am submerged in a black ocean that reaches the shadowed corners of my memories and fills the crevices in the ugliest parts of my imagination, taunting me with my deepest fears of the known and the unknown. These waves know me. And the menacing energy they leave behind is unshakable, it stains my face with hopelessness.

They threw old stones at my skin but old stones did not hurt me.
They scraped me, igniting like a flint.

They threw sticks at my red skin but sticks did not hurt me.
They danced like children around a bonfire, my flames only growing greater.

They spat their words at my skin but words did not hurt me.
They wished to drown my blaze, but their words shattered to lone letters, like a mirror reflecting the cracks in their bones.

They dared to step closer and their skin bubbled with blisters from the scolding sting of my heat.
But do not dare to condemn me for my rage,
 when hate is all I eat.

You tell me you'd like to see me again, 
what you'd like isn't my concern, I'm not an old friend


You know not this person, though she looks like me,
the young girl you reminisce could no longer be 
Don't give yourself credit, for you were not the artist,
I watched myself burn in flames, turns out I'm quite the arsonist,
and I laughed like a lunatic under the full moons light,
as the flames painted their shapes on the surface of my eyes and boy did they gleam bright

If we were to meet now, it would only leave you confused,
that young girl ran out of love after it kept being used
but humans need a fuel, a drive, a will to live,
and she flew on her pain, so now pain is her gift to give
She doesn't need to survive because she can rise from the dead,
she grew a second voice, a second brain, replaced her heart with Medusa's head

and you would not like to see me again, 
what you would like is not my concern, I am not your old friend.

I heard foreign thoughts spoken by an inner voice I no longer recognised. The paranoia began engulfing me like a pathogen, consuming me rapid and completely the way he once had. I have tried flicking through the pages of us but the motions of a scribbling hand desperate to etch the words to  paper before the moment passed had smudged the ink across the middle, the way it had blurred in my memory. All the page now read was once upon a time and the end. I pondered, trying to understand how he had become a stranger to me once again, but began to realise that it was I who had become a stranger in my own mind.
 I looked through rose tinted glass for you, for you I call stupidity hope and truth a paranoia. I notice your inconvenient paths past her, I recognise the way she grins at you the way I once had. The suspicion is alien to me, an insecurity I did not know I was capable of but the glances you exchange  that you think I don't see are too familiar. Had you ever really listened to me, you would know better than to take me for a fool. I see you, I see her,  I see it all... I see you reading this right now. 

Her eyelashes flicker like the broken bulb above,

As she lies through the grit of her teeth

Of the places she's been, and things she has seen,

Of which we will never know.

She howls at the moon from her bedroom window,

And it rains from the doors of her soul

About the pain inside, the demons within, 

Of which we will never know.

The heavy mask upon her skin is painted thicker each day,

Whilst we are deluded by one side of the mirror

By the image she creates to hide the bruised victim beneath,

Of which you will never know. 

What a beautiful truth it is that the lips that compose such beautiful words, to express his beautiful mind, crave mine. That he chooses to share the tools of his creations with me. And when we kiss, I can feel us falling further into each other with every touch, merging into one energy of synchronicity. I close my eyes and watch us in my imagination. I envision our auras escaping from the breath exchanged between us, rising like red and orange stained smoke. The vivid swirls resembling marble defying the darkness of the night surrounding us, one intertwining the other, undisturbed by the skies tears. Every particle of my matter feels magnetized to him. I surrender.

My limbs latch to his frame a little longer than I know they ought to, clinging to his hinges for I have broken from mine.
And I search for a soul within those blue pools searching back at me a little deeper than I know I ought to, believing I could swim...
 but I'm drowning in him.

The heavy heartbeat of the party enchants me into a hypnotic trance as I enter the strangers home. The large red door acts as a portal, teleporting me to my escape. I am there, I am in the moment, I am lost in my twisted utopia. My eyes attempt to decipher the exhausting variety of flashing colours exposed to them whilst the room appears to be wild and spinning. The thunderous bass, blinding illuminations and vaguely familiar tastes, all too overpowering to sense, feel or think of anything else, send me into a state of mental paralysis where no thought can penetrate the wall of carelessness that has been built. It makes me feel like Alice... perhaps this is this is my wonderland.

I wanted to feel complete, fulfilled yet balanced like the yin yang. I wanted him to be someone who possessed what I lacked and lacked what I possessed. I wanted to share my strength where he was weak, and my weakness where he was strong. To fill the empty spaces we could not occupy alone like the protruding pieces and indents of a jigsaw becoming one because together the bigger picture appears just a bit simpler, just a bit easier and just a bit clearer.

He gave me experiences where I had none and in turn I returned his alluring gazes with the brand new vision he awoke in me. Alas, his experiences had grudgingly plunged him into the big pond of maturity and I was the small but great fish reviving the youth within him. And amid our lacklustre lives, emerged a foreign element of fear that this entanglement could be exposed and stolen from us, compensated by the exhilaration from the pleasure that could be gained from it. 

Her thoughts grew like white roses, but the thorns pierced her mind,

A paradoxical enigma , impossible to define.

Her cranium echoed the whispers of the words so unkind,

And though her legs rapidly carry her away, inside her head she is confined.

For her compassion had never been nurtured, therefore it did not grow,

When she needed water and sunlight, her petals were buried under snow.

But her roots have been lifted, and fixed in the earth's warm core,

now ultraviolet energy surges through her veins, and she is not cold anymore.

The thought of losing what has never been mine,
doesn't do justice to our destinies design

Why would the world be so cruel as to let our souls collide,
only to tear us apart, like I'm the shore and you're the tide

I would make you my sun, my moon and my stars,
we could wake to the sound of waves and not cars
And once we've escaped to a far away land,
our trails will fade, like footprints in the sand.

Life feels so surreal. I wake up every day different like I am several people from a video game crammed in one body, spontaneously changing character as they please. Like the sky is always different, so am I. Pastel pink and blue skies calm me, but ferocious burning ambers warm and thrill me. I've heard that you should challenge yourself once every day, getting out of bed can be mine today. Ahh. As I drag my legs out of bed like pulling a rusty anchor from the bottom of the ocean,  I can endure the standard blunt ache, pain and soreness in every fibre of every muscle of my legs from my training/torture of the night before telling me that they've had enough, begging me not to push them anymore but I fight the desire to collapse back down and continue to walk anyway.

I'm not a 'morning person', but I do secretly love the mornings. I dislike being disturbed from my escape of reality, a beautiful senseless dream after forcing myself to face the day and remove myself from the comfort of my bed that always feels like I am the filling of a fluffy cloud sandwich in the morning but any strangers cold bed at night. All of this counterbalanced with the sun, soft but blinding, peaking over the black outlines and shapes of buildings shooting golden rays at my dusty window that seep light through the oak wooden blinds whilst the room glows with an autumn warmth. Most of all the blissful silence and numbness of the world and my mind. Erased memories, empty roads and lifeless streets. If I'm lucky, I won't remember the stresses and worries of yesterday for a while, I will feel light and free like helium has been pumped into my lungs, as if I could float out the window and touch the sunlight with my fingertips. Until the deafening ring of the alarm shakes me out of my bubble and i become exposed to the harsh world we live in. The silence is interrupted by the buzzing of merged voices getting louder and closer, the light is blocked out by scrambles of crowds and endless numbers of indistinctive faces, i remember everything i  wanted to forget and suddenly i am not floating, i am falling, faster than  my brain can process. Overwhelming thoughts swarm my mind like distressed bees in a hive flooded and oozing with honey.
 My body takes control and routinely stretches my arms upwards reaching for the ceiling knowing I won't contact it as I slowly rise up to my toes and with the cracks of my bones,  I'm ready.

(An old extract written in 2013)

To some it is the key purpose of our species existence, it is the trail of golden breadcrumbs of undetectable clues that destiny dusts over your path, it is what entices you to spontaneously turn right instead of left one day into a collision of another soul carved so intricately and compatibly with yours. To others, like myself, an alien concept I haven't quite grasped the understanding of... yet.  It's almost a coming of age ritual for an 18 year old to make mistakes when trying to identify this concept/feeling/choice with our naïve and self assured frame of mind.  Whilst the lion's share of teenage girls I am acquainted with seem to trust they know it all, it's the clarity of my confusion that concerns me a little. The fact that I am aware and understand my misunderstanding. The fact that my realisation and acceptance of this knowledge doesn't disturb me as much as I imagine it should.

And each time I glanced away from him, I felt his gaze strengthen as though he was feeding off my timidity. And each time I returned I was met by two beautiful hungry eyes... hungry for colour, for light, for mutual contact. They were blue and icy yet somehow held a warmth in them that enticed me in, a warmth that could only come from within, a true indication of a fine heart. It may have only been a single moment, or a compilation of single moments but it had captivated me and tattooed my mind like a photograph.

I existed in the still darkness at the back of the cab. My thoughts did not accompany me but they too were in darkness. As the vehicle intertwined the towering structures of the big city like a concrete labyrinth, I heard the sounds of moonlight sonata glide past my thoughts softening the harsh sights. We passed replicas of indistinguishable buildings that blurred in my mind into one stretched panorama. We had traveled far but it seemed time had frozen. I had the strangest notion of being in space, being motionless and alone, watching the earth from a distance. The frowned on drinking culture that littered every street became a moment of art and the intoxicated creatures belonging to it were no longer disturbing but intriguing visions as I knew they could not reach me. Looking out upon the chaotic disarray only made me feel more at peace, the same way you feel warmer in bed when rain droplets knock on your window outside. I had become a secluded voyeur of the nights secrets like the stars that hid behind the clouds .  This did not feel like my home anymore, it felt like London.