What the fuck do I even say to you guys.

Do I just confirm that it's still pretty fucking bad here.

Because it is. Oh god it is.

And no signs of getting better.

Whoever said it gets better?

Well, they're really fucking wrong.

It only gets worse.

So, so much worse.

Why'd I even log on.

The River III

He was sitting at the riverbank this time, watching the gray river churn and splash. I approached him, almost grasping at the fact that I was in a dream and yet not conscious enough to actually realize it. He turned around as he heard the dead grass crunch under my feet, and he grinned.

"Welcome back, Owen."

I sat down next to him.

"Yeah, whatever."

His arm unexpectedly shot out and folded over my shoulders.

"Don't be such a downer, man."

I chose to ignore him, and while I awaited the dream to end, I watched the water push past us, downstream and towards some unknown end. It intrigued me, so I decided to ask Grey about it.

"Y'know, it's interesting, right? Where the River goes... where all rivers go, really. But... I can't spoil it for you. Or at least, I won't spoil it for you."

What he said pissed me off. But I wasn't going to speak out against it. Whatever. He didn't want to talk about it? Alright, fine.

A few minutes pass by, and then he stood up. And then he was walking away. I... I almost stood up too, admittedly. To follow him, for whatever reason. I caught myself, though, and held my ground.

He turned around.

"...And you're not coming?"

I got up, and began to walk the opposite direction.

But then he was in that direction too. I looked back, and he was no longer behind me, just in front.

"Going somewhere?"

I shook my head, and tried to walk past him.

His hand fell down on my shoulder and I stopped.
 
"Why don't you trust me?"

I faced him.

"Because you're a goddamn stranger in my dream? Why the hell should I trust you?"

His hand tightened.

"You're afraid of me hurting you, eh? But does me being a stranger have anything to do with that expectation? At least in your case, really."

"...What do you even mean?"

"You know what I mean. Everyone that has ever hurt you, you knew very, very well. Hell, even your own parents have hurt you. Your mother fucking abu-"

I shrugged his hand off of my shoulder.

"I want out of this dream. Now."

"...I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Owen."

"...Wha-"

He backs up, away from me. The River changes. The water morphs  into a giant wall and it floods the banks. It surrounds the both of us, and we're caged in by a swirling twister of water and mist and ice.

The twister suddenly stopps, as if time itself quit. Grey pushes his right arm into it, and it all evaporates. The steam rises up rapidly, and I close my eyes, and shield my face from it.

I open my eyes, and we're not there anymore. We're in complete darkness.

And then, a smashed karaoke machine falls from the sky and hits the ground in between us. I fall to the ground with it. The walls around us morph into reality and I am reliving my mother's tirade.

I'm on the verge of breaking when it all stops and Grey steps in front of me and offers a hand.

"I can help end that. You can be happy again. Grasp my hand, and let me in, Owen; and then, I'll take care her for us. Then, we can be happy, Owen. Together. Just let. me. in."



The dream ended there. I ended it through sheer force of will, I think. I woke up, and my arm was bleeding because I was pinching it so hard in my sleep.

Bloodlust

It's like I've been turned into a vampire. I walk around at night, lurking the streets as if I'm looking for some wayward wanderer to consume. And then, the mirrors; I keep looking into mirrors, and it's as if like, I see little flashes of another person replacing me in the mirror?

And the thing is... that person looks a little like Grey.

That's not even the worst part. The worst part is underneath all of this. All of this fear, paranoia, insomnia, and chaos, there's this recurring.... anger, inside of me. It keeps bubbling to the surface, pushing against my mind and every time it does I come close to giving in and letting it overtake me.

No. Wait. That's not the worst part of it all.

The worst part is sometimes that anger manifests as a bloodlust.

And fuck. What the fuck am I anyways. Am I. Am I like turning into something like a serial killer? Is that what this is??

I just want it stop.

The River II

This time I didn't wake up. This time, I was walking along the River. It seemed like snow was on the verge from falling out of the dead sky, and wind gusts bustled over and in from the opposing shoreline of the River.

I didn't become aware of being in dreamland until I looked down into the water and saw no reflection of my self. My eyes widened, I looked up suddenly, and then my eyes stopped their gaze towards the opposing shore. Grey was standing there... and then, next to me, again.

"What's up, doc?"

"....Why am I here again?"

He looks over the river.

"Dude... you are here... to admire the scenery!"

He looks back at me, clearly satisfied of fucking with me.

"Seriously? Well, alright-"

I turn 360 degrees quickly, and then face him again.

"Alright I took the grand tour now let me go please."

He laughs for like a whole minute.

"Nahhh, bro. Chill out. Come on, walk and talk with me!"

And so I did.... and I have no idea why I did. I mean, hell, I was walking with some stranger who just happened to look like me in an everlasting winter wasteland. I had no reason to even be in that dream in the first place. And yet, it felt... comforting to have someone else there with me.

We said nothing at first. It bothered me. He seemed content to just walk along the border of the water and land with a smirk plastered on his face. However, I felt the uncomfortable silence set in; that pause in conversation I was all too familiar with. I tried to find something to say, anything, but I just could not fucking do it, like always. I was sinking like a stone in the silence.

And then he struck the silence away.

"Calm yourself, child. I can feel you shake from just this distance."

I was startled by the sudden serious tone in his voice. However, ...my body automatically calmed itself. My breathing steadied, and my heart pumped at a manageable pace. I felt comfortable again, at his command.

It perplexed me, but I kept walking regardless.

"You're too nervous, dude. Always shaking, always wondering about others' expectations. You just need to chill the fuck out."

"..."

I didn't know what to say to him.

The shoreline never curved, never faltered, never collapsed. It kept on and on forever, in one continuous line. Grey whistled as he seemingly inspected the water, while I kept my gaze on his back.

He turns around.

"Not much of a conversationalist, eh?"

"I.. I guess not."

"This entire time, dude, I was waiting for you to speak up. You didn't even take the chance! Why are you scared?"

I looked away from him, into the River,.

"I don't know..."

He grabs my shoulder yet again. The feeling pushes through the fabric of my shirt, through my skin, and spills into my bones.

"...You're wounded. That's why."

His other hand grasps my other shoulder.

"I can see it, Owen. This is your heart-"

His hand slides down my chest and over my heart.

"-and it's broken into tiny, tiny, tiny pieces. And those pieces are breaking. And soon there will be no-"

And that's when I woke up.

Different

What's happening to me?

I feel like... some thing's wrong. About me. I mean. Much more than I thought was wrong earlier. Like, I'm literally broken. Like I require medical attention, and quick.

Something feels drastically different. That weight I was talking about earlier... it feels like it's increased ten-fold. Everything's out of order.

I tried to tell my mother. She didn't even listen.

What's happening to me.

The River

I awoke in the middle of a dream last night; on frozen grass covered in frigid dew. The sky was overcast with gray and I was surrounded by the dull green of rustic grass. Dead trees scratched at the sky with their branches, surrounding me and the shoreline ahead, which stretched out before my eyes.

When I approached the shore, the expanse of a river revealed itself. It was the water of deep Winter; that deep gray-white color that anyone who lives near a city knows all too well about. It's beautiful, yet haunting. It's moving and alive, and yet it seems so still and dead.

Across the aquatic sprawl, there was the opposing shoreline. It was far, far away, and yet not too far. It was a contradiction of time and space. And on the shore, there were structures. I could hardly see them, and yet they were as clear as the water sloshing at my feet. They were rotting, decayed abandoned urban leftovers from some past decade I never got to suffer through.

I sat there for God knows how long. It was somber and yet fulfilling. I felt at ease, almost. I had always been surrounded by Death... but it was always hiding. It was a nice change of pace to finally see it all out in the open, instead of hiding in other people and objects.

But then I saw him on the opposing shore. He was sitting exactly like I was, and had seemingly just noticed me too. We stared at and into each other for almost a minute.

But then his gaze shifts to his right and I shift my gaze to my left, to find him sitting right next to me with his face close to mine. The shock startled me into jumping back a few feet away.

He looked... like me. Almost exactly like me. Only his hair was grayish white, and his eyes... it's hard to describe them. One moment I thought they were blue but the next I only saw everlasting gray. His face was pale, paler than even a corpse's face, and he was biting his lip in anticipation. He stared at me.

He didn't say anything. So I tried to say something.

"Uh... hello...?"

He disregarded the reluctant greeting and continued the staring contest. I straightened myself up, and quizzically stared back at him.

He finally replies one uncomfortable silence later.

"Yes. Hi."

I squint my eyes in disbelief. Seriously, was that all?

"Is that all...? Hi back? ...Who are you?"

His lips curl up in satisfaction.

"Blue eyes?"

He points at my eyes.

"Uhhhh. Yeah, I guess?"

He laughs.

"Me too!"

His eyes quickly shift again from gray to blue. Dreams are weird.

"Uh. Sure...? So, are you like my inner consciousness or something? What's the point of this dream?"

His face morphs into a serious grimace and he pushes his face towards mine. I jump back once again. His face, inches away from mine, contorts into another playful grin.

"How do you know this is a dream? How do you know this isn't reality?"

I search for an answer. I can't find one. Too philosophical and hypothetical for my stupid brain to grasp.

"Ha! Cat got your tongue, eh?

I shake my head and look down at the grass. He was annoying me.

"But really... yes, this may be a dream. For now.."

He gets up from the ground, and looks down at me. He offers me a hand.

I felt nervous looking up at him. I felt nervous just being around him. I wanted to run. Run far away. But what was the harm anyways? He was a) apart of me, b) I can't get hurt in dreamland and c) he was no better than a toddler. What was the harm in it?

So I grabbed his hand. It was colder than the grass, and yet there was this other feeling about it as well. It was neither hot or cold. It was something I can't describe now, and hell, I don't think I'll ever be able to.

He pulled me up from the ground and I stood literally eye level to him.

"What do you want anyways?" I asked bluntly.

That was when he placed his hand on my shoulder. The alien feeling seeped through my clothes and into me.

"I wanted to meet you. That's all!"

He placed his other hand on my other shoulder.

"Your name is Owen. And my name is..."

The dream ended. I awoke in my bed as the morning sun dug into my feet. Despite the dream cutting off before I could hear the name directly, I still somehow knew his name.

His name was Grey. He stole my middle name and made it his own.

Lonely Streets

I've had the urge to wander around my neighborhood every night for almost a year now. To get away and to explore my surroundings. To see what it's like after midnight.

But ever since this.... thing or whatever happened to me, I've expanded my walking to all over town. Every morning I come home exhausted and on the verge of collapse, and my mother hardly even notices. Every night, I'm out among the homeless and the broken. Every night, I'm searching. I don't know for what.

It's as if my feet move by themselves.

Food for Wolves

This is torture. This is fucking torture and it won't stop.

I can't sleep. I can't eat.  I can't concentrate. I can't think. I can't move. I'm hardly living. I feel like I'm dead already and they just haven't put me in my damn coffee. I meant coffin. I don't know anymore.

I feel like the emptiness inside of me has been filled, with an anchor of pure negativity. It's pulling me down and down into the depths of the jaws of this beast that I just can't seem to recognize yet. It's slowly closing its trap upon me and then there will be no hope left. Nothing but me in the darkness.

And then I'll just be food for wolves.

Inside and Outside

Something is happening to me.

I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m rotting away. I feel… I feel like I’m slowly dying inside and outside. For the past week, I’ve been constantly forgetting things, suddenly remembering things, and constantly questioning the order of my life. Everything’s become chaos and it just won’t goddamn stop.

And the voices. I’m hearing voices. Or, at least I think they’re voices… and not just one continuous voice screaming and laughing and whispering in the background. I’m hoping it’s just voices.

What’s happening to me?? Am I like… going crazy? Or was I already crazy… and now it’s been released? Maybe I’m broken. Maybe I’m breaking and my inner demons are spilling out and I can’t fight them off.

Or maybe this is reality and

I was Death

The nightmare was much more clear than it ever had been before. I struggled and struggled but the waves pushed me down and down into the darkness. I kept falling and sinking towards the bottom of the river and this time, I truly believed that I would actually drown down there.

It felt real. I mean, all of them had felt real beforehand, but this one was on an entirely new level. The freezing water pushed down my throat and filled my lungs and I felt myself become weighed down. At one point, I could no longer move my legs, and then at another point, I couldn’t move my arms either.

I was at the bottom of everything, and my body was no longer mine. It belonged to the river and to the darkness invading it. I was dying. I was dead. I was Death.

And then I awoke in my bed, and for a moment I thought I was wet from water. Instead, I was simply covered in disgusting sweat.

The lid on the pocketwatch was open, and the hands were frozen at 4:44 in the morning. I closed it, and tried going back to sleep.

Broken Headphones

I sit alone on my bed. The moonlight pushes through my window and washes over my body. I can practically feel the night surround Portsmouth, and I can hear the remnants of day sizzle away.

The pocketwatch is still ticking. It rests against my neck. I don’t know why I took it. I shouldn’t have. I think I may have stolen it from someone. I don’t care though.

My brothers are sleeping, for once in their lives. My sister is watching the Backyardigans downstairs. My mother is in the laundry room, smoking cigarettes and drinking.

I’m in here, as usual. I want to take a walk but my headphones are broken and I don’t think I can take the silence of the streets as they are now. It’s cold and lonely outside, just like inside, but without the comfort of a blanket and the entertainment of reading or writing.

I want to write, but I feel like I shouldn’t. I feel like I should somehow… take back all of it. Take all of the words back… to erase them from existence completely. But it’s too late now. The words have already escaped. But, even worse, the ideas fled along with the words.

What am I even complaining about, though. What am I even thinking. Why am I thinking. Why can’t I just shut the fuck up and stop. Just, stop. Stop everything, completely. I don’t want to go on any longer.


If I go to sleep now and let my dreams take me, will I wake up and escape from this nightmare?

Pocketwatch

I saw her reading those books again. I walked downstairs and there she was, flipping through them. I stomped down the stairs, walked with heavy feet, almost knocked over the piles in the den, tripped over a couple of DVD’s, and she didn’t even blink or look at me or anything.

Those damn books contribute to her illness. They’re those books about how you can change your life with just “positive thinking” and “believing in something really hard”. And I don’t mean, in a kind of common sense “well fucking duh life is always better when you actually try.” I mean, my mother thinks she is going to win the lottery just because she believes she can.

It’s helped ruin our lives. I remember, one cloudy, gray Sunday morning, our mother picked us up from our grandmother’s for some unknown reason. She wouldn’t say, until we were out of the Portsmouth line. She told us about her new “religion” and “way of life.” She told us about how everything was going to change and that we would be living in some goddamn mansion soon, instead of poverty.

I screamed and cried and told her to pull the damn car over. She just smiled.

She took us to the city of Suffolk, and to some rich neighborhood. The houses were gigantic and yet many of them were for sale. She parked the car in front of the seemingly most expensive house in the entire complex, and got out and told my siblings to come with her. I refused to go.

She showed my little sister the entire house and told her about how she would be living there soon. It doesn’t sound cruel… but we were raised in a certain environment, and now she was waving this false promise in front of someone who couldn’t know better.

The memory of that day drove me as I picked those damn books up. My mom had gone out back to smoke a cigarette, so it was the perfect opportunity. I ran out the front door as fast as I could. I ran right, and down the street on the sidewalk, despite the neighbors looking at me. I held onto the books tight, took another right, and ran towards the creek and where the old bridge used to stand.

There used to be a bridge in this neighborhood. However, the bridge brought over all sorts of crime from the neighborhood next to us. Soon, our neighborhood began to decay alongside the other one. The city decided to tear down the bridge, and now the only thing that remains of it is buried in the creek, forgotten and rotting and disappearing.

I tossed those books out into the creek as hard and fast as I could. They splashed into the water and the ripples spread out far and wide. The reeds swished and swayed, and I fell down to the grass.

As soon as the books had left my hand, I realized that no matter what I did, it wouldn’t change a thing. Though the books certainly didn’t help, it was my mother that did all of this in the end. And it was me, too. Hell, all of it. If I hadn’t of been born, then all of this wouldn’t of happened.

The belief was preposterous. Belief gets you zilch. Faith? What the fuck had that ever gotten me? God’s one thing, but believing in the self… that one will succeed. That one will get through it all unscathed.

Trust me, from firsthand experience, I know better.

I could believe in something all I wanted and it would do nothing. Hell, I could believe in the Fears. I could believe that the demons inside of me are real, and they’re stalking the streets. But belief is a fabrication created by humanity to help conceal or keep truth alive.

For all I know, my entire life is a lie. It’s already a mistake… I think a lie would make it better for me. If all of this isn’t truly happening… maybe I’m stuck in some sort of continuous nightmare? Who knows?

I broke out of my teenage philosophical trance as the touch of cold metal rubbed between my fingers. I grabbed onto something and brought it to my eyes. A pocketwatch.

It was gray-silver-steel in color, with a chain necklace connected to it. I felt the frigid chain against my hands, and let it drop bit by bit through my fingers. It scraped at the grass and the dirt, swinging and swaying back and forth.

Then I stopped the chain and held it taut, with the watch held up against thick blades of grass. Its lid unlatched, and the inner clock’s face revealed itself. The clock’s hands were stuck at the 12 o’ clock position. My eyes were transfixed upon it.

And that’s when the ticking began.

The ticking was soothing, for some reason. I let my mind get lost within it. Tick, tock, tick, tock. I walked away from the water with the rhythm in mind. Tick, tock, tick, tock. The seconds floated away as I made my way back to my dark home. Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick.

I felt strange. I felt lost. I felt like I was alone… and yet, I also had the feeling that someone was watching me. For a second, I chuckled with the thought that maybe the Fears were real, and hey, maybe they were on the verge of tearing me apart.



I couldn’t tell if that thought scared me, or comforted me.