The mystery is your eyes.

And your voice, and the way your hands and mine would look intertwined, how low your voice would get should it whisper in my ear, and how pale my skin would look close to yours.

Your skin is the mystery, dark, like the bitterest chocolate or the night sky, and oh, how I want to be the stars in that sky, bright dots in the darkness, a mystery unto themselves. 

The mystery is your body, so lithe and graceful that I wonder why God did not give you…

The nerve of that stupid, overeager, drooling, swaggering Prince Ali!

To think that I would even set foot near him, after I caught him plotting with my father, talking about me as if I were so much grain at the market!

But even so....when he saw me, for that moment, just a flash, I thought I saw a glimpse of....no, it couldn't be.

Aladdin is long dead, and I must forget him.

But how can I when  all I see when I close my eyes is his…

My skin, once so smooth and whole and (it goes without saying) snowy white and pure.

And now, after that horrid bit of lace foisted upon me by that awful woman....I have scars. 

Horrid scars on my neck, and my chest from where I clawed myself.

How can I ever be thought beautiful again? 

People will look through the glass and be appalled!

I am no princess, only a broken shell of a girl with horrid scars and no beauty left to me.

Those damn villagers have the unnerving gall to build around my tower of solitude. They are practically taunting me, waiting for the tower to fall down, to crumble into nothingness, but news flash, sorry to disappoint you all...it won't. Part of the charm (and I mean the quite literally) of this god-forsaken antiquated piece of architecture is that it will never topple, never age, never let anything inside of  it age...including me. I still have the scars, you know, from trying to crawl out.…

I gave up my voice for him; I gave up my home, my family, my friends, my firstborn right to the Kingdom of the Sea. I gave up everything for him, and still he does not understand me. I felt as if I was drowning the first time I saw him; those big brown eyes trapped me in their swirling, wonderful hope. I still have the scars you know, on my vocal cords...on my heart; I watched everything I ever had slip away from me, thinking we could make this work, and now look what has…

Of course he has his flaws, but at least that whole identity crisis is over. He still gets a little rough sometimes, and he still has that primeval growl, but he really is a gentle creature. He was never a monster, never a thing to have nightmares about. You only had to be close to him; he simply didn't know his own strength. I still have the scars though, from when he forgot to be gentle. You can hardly blame him though; it must be hard to be The Beast.

I am going crazy for several reasons, most prevalent among them being the irritating fact that it is 81 degrees halfway through November.

I feel like I am just drifting, with no impetus, no excitement, the only options ahead of me being whether to go see a movie or a party with the same old drunken people doing the same old stupid things.

I am caught in a stalemate, losing my mind, and my cellmate is my love life caught in a fucking dead end.

Right now I am that cloud…

Our days were a blur of anticipation and cooler air, high-pitched gossip and the clicking of pens, weak fall sunshine and the prospect of Friday night before us.

It was the best of times, but everyone wanted it to end, graduation wavering like a heat-haze before us, teasing us occasionally, but growing ever closer, however imperceptibly.

Maybe they were right, and we didn't have a clue, but maybe we knew that we just had fun not knowing what the hell we were doing, just…

"I don't see why you don't give him a  chance," says Jade in one of her frequent lapses toward the insensitive, without seeing the quick flash of pain in the hazel eyes of Amber.

But I did.

Amber shrugs her golden shoulders and waves off the question, meeting my eyes and pleading with me to keep my silence, keep her secret.

You see, Jade doesn't know what happened, happened that night, that night at the party, the party that was wrong from the beginning, wrong because…

I felt you leave me today.

You were there one moment, hanging on to one of my heartstrings for dear life, and the next moment, when I had said what I really wanted to say, admitted to myself how I really felt, stopped blowing smoke up my own ass, you were gone.

So now my stomach doesn't twist up when I see your name, my heart doesn't pound any faster when I see something on your Facebook, and no green monster of decayed jealousy rises up on my back when I see her posting about…

I am deeply sorry that the douchebag agent with the retarded name turned down your brilliantness. He is obviously too stupid to see what a wonderful talented awesome gifted writer you are. His loss, frankly, and he will feel like a sincere idiot when you make millions and win the Nobel prize. Keep your chin up and keep looking don't let this get you down. he is obviously a substandard agent if he doesn't recognize true talent when he sees it. I love you.

This goes out to my…

Look at me.

No, I mean it....look at me.

Look past what your eyes can see, look past my makeup, past my clothes, past everything you know about me....look past all that.

And see me.

The real me, the me that loves with abandon who looks for the good in everyone who can't stand to be judged and who likes you...pure and simple.

There, I said it...and now I'm the one who's vulnerable, the one without the power the one who is standing here under your eyes asking…

Commitment issues don't exist, wanna know why? 

Because nobody is afraid of commitment, they are afraid of no commitment, being left, having their commitment betrayed, and they are afraid that once they commit they will find something better.

Commitment issues are a cover to hide behind when someone opens up to you and you don't want to open up to them so you just say "Oh, I have......commitment issues."

Bullshit.

And I hate when…

I have this sick fascination with train wrecks.

Watching everything spiral hopelessly out of control, the wild, the inescapable.

You are my train wreck;

you are my screeching to a halt wild unchecked headlong rush into blackness, cold, numb.

And the thing is, I had fair warning; I knew the train wreck would occur, when and where, who would be there, and what I could do to stop it.

So I did.

You see, I have this wonderful fascination with the color…

Today was a day to be heartbroken; he's back, he's with her, and not with me; and some boys just can't carry on a conversation; today was a day to be heartbroken, and then something changed.

For starters, I went about being heartbroken the wrong way: I got  my homework done early, the weather is perfect, Halloween is tomorrow, and I am listening to Thomas Cunningham. 

These are not the ingredients to a heartbroken me.

Then Big Poppa E said "I don't wanna make out with…

Wake in a dew-drenched wood, tangled in skin, sun slowly rising behind you, and I charge you to race, to run, to leap to bound into the rising sun.

Abandon your homes, with their comforts and closeness and locks and double-pane windows, embrace the mud and the dirt and the rain and the smell of desire.

Stay away from the stores that scream at you to be prettier, be sexier, be chaste, be classy, be natural, to be anything but, to be MORE.

Dare to imagine what it would be…

You're coming home this week, and I'm not sure how I should feel.

Righteous Anger, Despairing Grief, Indifference, Excitement, and Vindictive Bitchiness are all lined up before me, waiting to be chosen.

I imagine a scene where I ask you to meet me somewhere: Hastings, perhaps, and we talk; I ask you the questions that have ravaged my mind these past three months:

"Why did you leave me why did you lie we were perfect was it a game to you did you think it…

I've been carrying around your letter, like a talisman of bad luck, picking at the scab until deep red anger oozes out, no longer coming easily but sluggishly and painfully, no longer hot and fast.

I've been carrying around your letter, because I like to look at it and remind myself that I did the right thing.

I've been carrying around your letter, because I'm a pathetic loser.

I've been carrying around your letter, reading it over and over, trying to understand why you…

We sit on the hilltop with the perfect view of the city--of course--that is the scene of so many moments like this you can practically see the expectations hovering in the air like heatwaves.

You arm is around me--of course it is--and the radio plays the song that is always playing..but no one can tell you what it is.

The city lights glitter and shine--of course they do--and we don't need to talk, because nobody talks in moments like these.

You whisper into my hair…

I beg of you, please, to develop a revolving door that does not require you to play beat-the-clock.

If you could, invent a coffee cup that makes your hot chocolate the perfect temperature and maintains it for more than thirty seconds.

I would really appreciate self-completing physics homework.

I would like a pen with electrode attached directly to my brain that writes down exactly what I think because my hand is a shitty translator, and things never come out quite as…