Username: Password: New      Mr. Prezident., Subject Posted By: XXXLKlintonLobby - March.19.2008, 04:19PM - Comments (2) H. Klinton vs Obama. How you think who will win elections? Read More... My dilemma is switching styles, Suggestions and discussion welcome Posted By: Sanctuary - March.14.2008, 06:53PM - Comments (2) Way back in another lifetime - I used to write more novel like but my heart was always in screenwriting. With the rebirth of Silent Shadows - I find myself delving back into the novel art-form - with one large problem - styles. Now, I've spent so long learning the art-form of screenwriting, which is descriptive in some ways but often more short, precise and to the point and here-in lies the problem: In re-reading my first hand attempt back into more novel like format "A fracture in Time", I find I'm falling short in that area of description. It reads too much like a script. I asked myself why and came up that I'm holding back. Inside there is a fear that in switching back and forth I'll unlearn the screenwriting skills. I have to let go of that and let the story just flow -in complete full descriptive mode. Anyone else experience this switching between styles? Thoughts on what I should be doing to avoid this or a way to allow the other style to come back through? Read More... Agony Posted By: ElderDaniel - February.27.2008, 07:41PM - Comments (0) "Here come the woman, with the look in her eye. Raised on leather, with flesh on her mind. Words as weapons sharper than knives, Makes you wonder how the other half die." --INXS, "The Devil Inside" The light from the bonfire blazed between her and I. The fire added heat that was hardly noticeable compared to the air in the small cave which was already warm from the blistering sun that had just set. The cave did provide shelter and shade but it did little to cool us during my nightly visits. I could see her perfectly beyond the flames, sparks, and wisps of smoke that rose and curled over the lip of the cave. As the light and shadows danced, I found it difficult to tell if her hair was scarlet or black. It seemed to change with the whim of a passing breeze. Her eyes, however, were honey brown and never gazed away from me. She was naked before me and I did not shy from her nudity. "I am the Agonist," she said softly, her fear breaking free for a moment from her previous bliss. I did not know the word and she sensed this. She continued, "I do not like the word antagonist because that immediately conjoins with adversary or enemy. An agonist is merely involved in a struggle; struggles lead to pain and agony, and that word, though still bitter, is more toothsome. I don't expect you to understand, empathize, or believe me." I frowned as I immediately felt I should defend her, or at least how I felt about her. I asked, "So then what do you want, Lilith?" She stood up and began to swish her arms with a grace that I should have known she could possess, yet it still took my breath away. She stepped back and forth, and slowly she started to twirl. A gentle spin at first, as if she was trying to remember long practiced moves that were more than rote. Her motions became fluid before my eyes as she whirled faster. In my mind I thought I could hear a drum beating for her to dance to. Then I realized it was my heartbeat thrumming in my ears. Inside the cave a small wind picked up speed around us. The heat of it stung my eyes for a moment, but I dared not look away from her. The wind whistled around inside the cave and fed the flames before me. The breeze rushed outside and I could hear it rustling trees and bushes nearby. It picked up speed as she danced faster, her body spinning so fast now that I could not understand what I saw before me. Was the heat causing waves of mirage distortion, or was she changing shape? She was not morphing into anything, but perhaps I was able to see her true self: the wind. Clouds were gathering outside, and though I could not see them behind me, I saw flashes of lightning that brightened the cave for an instant. My shadow was painted on the walls of the cave then, but her shadow was not there. The clap of thunder followed, and it echoed so loud within the cave that I screamed and my heart stopped. When my heart beat stopped, in that moment, I saw her frozen in a trance brought on by the dance. My heart thumped back to life and her whirling continued at a breakneck pace. Did she bring about the storm, or was she the storm? Wind and rain, thunder and lightning. It was all connected, and it was all her. It never clicked until then, but I understood. Of all the gods and goddesses, the others were the sun, moon, and stars. But Lilith, she was the breath of life. She wasn't the night -- that was Nyx. No, Lilith was the night air. That which peasants feared once upon a time. I never understood why they feared it. Sure, the night air could be colder, harsher, but is that reason to fear it? The wind that whipped around me thrilled my skin. It did not chill me here in the warm cave. Yet I still had chills down my spine, and goose pimples all over me as I felt the energy of the wind. Another realization dawned on me then. I felt this before when I was young as a dust devil approached and surrounded me. I didn't try to avoid its path, and as it rushed around me then I felt the sensation I felt now. That was when I smiled at the thought of Lilith being the dust devil then just as she was now. As I was at such peace by the memory and the feeling surrounding me that my heart beat slowed, and to my surprise, so did her dance. Was I really the drummer of her whirling dervish? When she slowed and the wind died down, I could see her graceful form again. As she finished her dance, her eyes once again met mine and I shuddered. There was contentment in her eyes, like a hunger fulfilled. She said nothing and with the wind calmed along with my heartbeat, all I could hear was the crackling of the fire between us. To break the silence, I asked her, "What was that?" She smiled an ineffable smile and replied, "The answer to your question. Everything has power; some things more than others. Words have more than most." I was confused again. I know she didn't mean to speak to me in riddles, but just the same, I did not understand. "Words are real; as real as the air they are carried on," she said as she walked through the flames and sat down next to me. She reached out her hand and caressed my face, and I could feel her presence. I felt neither warm flesh nor cold, yet I felt her touch and more than that I cannot express. "When you tell a story of me, it is as though life were breathed into me. Many stories have been told of me." I nodded recognition of many stories told and written about Lilith, most of them quite nasty. Though as I sat there with her, I did not believe any of them. Temptress she may be, but a demoness, succubus or vampire? Would I recognize such a creature if I saw one, though? I asked, "Are the stories true?" "One cannot say that they are true or false," she answered again without logic. She smiled and said, "I am not a person who can be judged, Daniel." That was when I realized that she knew my name. I mean, I knew who she was and as surely as she summoned me, I knew she had to know me. Yet, to hear my name was a surprise. It was almost if I'd forgotten my own name and her saying it sparked memories I didn't know I'd lost. It was then that I wondered if it wasn't necessarily me that she was addressing, but my name. Daniel is a Hebrew name, as is Lilith, but I did not understand the significance, so I said, "I am not judging you; I'm merely curious." "Curiosity is a dangerous thing," she said with a wry grin. "Stories are like masks that we all wear. Some are made by our own hands and others are crafted by strangers. They may be beautiful or grotesque, but in the end we must decide if they really reflect who we are." She went to push some hair from her face and removed her mask, and it was then that I woke up. Read More... The Storm Posted By: Rhiannon - January.7.2008, 09:19PM - Comments (0) The sound of the wind carries your voice away from me. I watch the hair blow across your face, your lips moving - but I can't hear what you say for the howling forces surrounding us. Suddenly, the rain starts to fall, creating a curtain around us - between us. You hold out your hand - a guide - a connection between us despite the gale. I hesitate - after all, I don't know you very well - but slowly reach out to touch your hand. I feel the solidness of the touch - the warmth and comfort offered by your hand. You lead us to shelter from the storm, running. Suddenly I start laughing despite being soaked by the rain - or maybe because I am dripping wet, clothes molded to me like a second skin. As we arrive at the gazebo, you offer me a seat on one of the benches, and make a show of putting down your handkerchief so as to give me a clean place to sit - totally wet, but clean. I giggle, but then curtsey and make a show of sitting down daintily on it - just in time for a wave of rain to soak (again) the back of my shirt. We laugh at the elaborate show of manners that we each have just displayed - for no good reason other than to enjoy the sound. The rain pounds on the roof and gusts of wind blow it inside occasionally - just as we are beginning to dry off, of course. The storm takes delight in ensuring that we are almost as wet under the shelter as we would be in the middle of the storm. We sit - and start to talk - and talk. Suddenly we look out of the gazebo. Hours have passed unbeknownst to us, and the rain and wind have left, leaving behind the wet ground and downed branches to show their passing. Night has fallen, and the moon slyly peaks around one of the departing clouds. The sound of nature fills the air - the croak of the frogs, hoot of the owls, cries of the night animals. We slowly leave the gazebo - walking hand in hand through the damp evening, being led only by the moon's illumination around us. The moon is not the only source of light to appear - as we see the gleam of the other's smile. Slowly we walk - delighting in the new friendship - and - maybe more? We savor the moment, knowing that the sun's bright light will show soon enough to show us - is this only a magical moment in time, or the beginning of something more substantial to come. Only time will tell, and, for now, we are not listening to her. Tomorrow will be soon enough. Read More... A Vision of Hell Posted By: Atnevon - January.6.2008, 11:14AM - Comments (0) What he saw before him when he opened his eyes would haunt him for the rest of his life, or it would have if he had one left to live. Jeremy couldn't remember how he got there or what had happened to him, but somehow he knew exactly where he was. Hell itself stood before him, and try as he might, he couldn't look away. A sea of people surrounded the mountain that lay before him, so dense and tightly packed that there was hardly a space between them. Their flesh was the darkest of reds, and their bodies were withered down to the bone. Dark caverns surrounded their eyes, and beneath their ripped clothing were gaping wounds with bits of exposed bone and muscle. Each had the look of a burn victim that was beyond the hope of recovery, and just the sight of them made his skin crawl below the surface. Every instinct he had inside him was pulling him away from the scene and telling him to run as far and as fast as he could go away from what he saw, but his legs kept moving him forward against his own will. Control was no longer his. Over and over again he told himself that this had to be a bad dream. He would wake up in a few minutes, safe in his own bed, and away from the horrors before him. But, even as he told himself this, the pure heat he felt in the air and the smell of rotting flesh was telling him that this was all too real to be a dream. This was a nightmare come to life. Using every muscle in his body to try to fight himself from moving forward, he was finally able to break free and re-gain control of his body. And, in that very same moment, he had come close enough to the crowd for them to take ahold of him and force him down to the ground. A hundred hands were all gripping his body and dragging him up the same mountain that only a few minutes ago was so far in the distance. Every rock below him was a jagged knife, cutting into his skin and tearing his clothing to shreds. Every gash seemed deeper than the one before it, and the pain seared like fire itself, but there was no blood dripping from him. It flowed still strong in him, keeping his senses fully in tune with what was happening to him, and stopping him from going weak to dull out the pain. Strength had become his greatest weakness and only added to his anguish. After what seemed like an eternity, he found himself at the top of the mountain he had seen, only to realize the torment that was about to befall him, for the mountain had become something else entirely from this view. It was a volcano he saw before him, and he was being pulled into its core by bodies that looked less and less human. Flames erupted from his clothing as he fought and kicked to try to pull away from the arms that grasped him, but not a single grip loosened. The last thing he saw was the skin dripping off his arms like wax off a candle, just before his eyes blurred and burst in their sockets from the heat. Reaching for his face to try to cover his eyes, he could only feel what was left of his cheeks oozing between his fingers. Then, at his last few minutes of consciousness, he could feel dozens of hands ripping at his flesh, tearing it off his body greedily for what he somehow knew was to consume it for themselves. Read More... Copyright information, For Authors Posted By: Atnevon - January.4.2008, 09:11PM - Comments (0) So as to clear up any confusion about the works listed on Silent Shadows, I wanted to setup this topic to help address any concerns that authors may have about posting here. Silent Shadows has been built from the ground up as a safe place for writers in all genres and all styles to get their works out there for the public to see and experience. When posting to this site, authors are not giving up any rights to their work, and will retain all rights to distribution and ownership. Should an author later decide that they wish for their work to be removed from our site, they may contact one of our staff members directly to have this taken care of as soon as possible, following verification via the registered email address of the author in question. Also, if a viewer or author suspects any work on this site of plagiarism, they are encouraged to contact our staff as well to research and attempt to determine if a complaint is valid. Should that work prove to be illegitimate, it will be removed from the site promptly and shall be replaced by a notice of the copyright infringement that occurred for any direct links from other sites to that work. For any questions or disputes not covered here, please do not hesitate to contact our staff for follow up. We are happy to assist in any way that we can, and we take copyright extremely seriously on behalf of our members. Read More... A Fracture in Time, Part 1 - The Parchment Posted By: Sanctuary - January.4.2008, 07:22PM - Comments (0) PART ONE The Parchment Nighttime stars litter the sky. A boy stood at the edge of a family of rocks by the waters edge and gazed dreamily out across an endless sea. The ocean, the thing he was born to, his loyal Alli and his nemesis, both a yin and a yang to him. It was always with her he could find balance to his life. It was always his first impulse to be here. To be close to her majestic waves. Her mysteries. Her truths. Her unfailing promises of things yet to be. He stood securely fixed in place. He was preparing. His eyes closed, his face turned to the ocean and head to the sky, he whispered a wish that cried out more like a prayer into the night. Clutched in his hand, a single peice of paper that no ones eyes but his had inspected. He looked down at it thoughtfully and in his heart he knew, it was going to be now or never. The boy opened his kind, warm eyes, and stared into the still waters directly ahead, as if he could see something clearly that lingered just over the horizon. An old wise woman watched the boy as he negotiated with the world for his dreams. She knew this boy well. She had peered into his future. With determination, the boy tossed the page high into the air. His vision of the future, his hope, all contained within it. It fluttered outward for the ocean's breeze to carry it to it's home on a distant shore. He watched for a moment as a brief gust of wind pulled the parchment high and away from the shoreline. The boy remained for some time and on feeling assured that it was bound for it's destination, he wandered from the shoreline and into a thick forest behind him. Now all he could do was wait. His job was done. Time and hope would have do the rest. The instant the boy was out of veiw, a dance began with the page but if you looked closely, squinting your eyes ever so slightly, you could tell that the dance wasn't a dance at all. It was a battle for control of the parchment. Destiny had been there all night with the boy. He was the breeze guarding and guiding the paper - but, like the boy, he too was not alone - something much darker, viperous and louring in nature lurked with him. It tugged at Destiny's grasp in an attempt to pull the parchment off its course and send it crashing into the water below. It wanted to drowned the parchment, drown it so deep in the ocean that it would be lost forever - but Destiny had other plans and he wasn't giving in without a fight. The old woman knew the adversary that Destiny had to face. She had seen it before on another night quite like this. The rules of the game begged that she not interfere. A rule that on this night, she was willing to break. The old woman approached the rocks. "Not this time." Her firm voice ripped into the darkness. The adversary, momentarily stunned by the interruption, released it's grip, giving the ocean the time she needed to whisk the paper back onto the rocks that lined the shore. Destiny reached for the page. His hand grabbed it firmly as it floated onto the rocks. With a solid thud, the old woman stomped her foot onto the page, narrowly missing destiny's palm, securing it to the ground under her watchful eyes. "Not this place - and not this boy." She stood poised, ready for a confrontation. Her eyes and that of the adversary's glaring with a will of fire toward the other. It hissed at the old woman before it disappeared into the night sky. A warning that it would return another night. This game had just begun. Destiny stood aside for the old woman and without hesitation, released the paper to her care. The old woman retrieved the parchment from the damp rock beneath her feet and looked at Destiny. "No" she said with a soft voice "I can't. It's not my place." She paused in awe at Destiny. She had never seen him up close before. "but a bird might be a safer bet. The winds are plagued with trouble these days." She relinquished the paper back to Destiny. In his hands, she knew the parchments destination would be reached - though it would be in the years still to come. Time passes quickly in the world but the ocean never forgets her duty - or her promises. For that night, she had spoken a silent promise to the boy and she intended to keep it. © 2007 Sanctuary Read More... The Girl and the Mountain, a true story of life choices. Posted By: Sanctuary - January.3.2008, 10:33PM - Comments (0) The Gift. I sat on a mountain, a real mountain, for the very first time. Long story short, the trip was an impromptu 'thank you' from an old boyfriend and the company he worked for that I had helped out in a pinch. His company had a place rented and a car. My old boyfriend called and said "You've never seen a real mountain come out here, stay a few weeks and don't worry about a thing." The flight was paid for, the food - everything. All I had to do was show up. I was feeling a little lost in life, something we all experience at some point in time or another. Some of us more than once in our life. Believe it or not, I actually had to 'think' about it before finally saying yes. Being on that mountain was powerful. In more ways than I could imagine. It has proven to be a decision that I will never regret. The Blinding Light. I sat there one night watching a beautiful sunset. A cool breeze flowing, the cleanest smell I had ever experienced. The silence of an internal calm - and a nagging persistent sense that something was missing and it wasn't letting go easily. I knew that it was time for a change. My path, that was once so clear to me, was clouded over. Nothing was right and I had no idea why. I was making films. I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. What I said at the age of 4 I would do. So what was missing? What was wrong with me? Did I not do what I always wanted? When the answer came to me, I was surprised at first as to what it was. No, I wasn't. "No." The answer resonated so loud it was shocking. It hit me hard. How could this be? How could the answer possibly be no! And then I remembered. When I began my journey into film there was a purpose in mind. A plan. A goal. Somehow in executing that plan, I lost sight of my goal - and in one quiet moment it all came flooding back. The mountain was talking and I was listening. Revelations. So there I was. Sitting there stunned for what seemed like days. A deer caught in headlights. How did I not see it all before? Way up here on this isolated mountain top everything was crystal clear. I never intended to stay in the position I was in, it was a means to an end - it was to bring me closer to the people that were like me. That loved film as I loved it. Kindred souls. The mountain continued to speak and I continued to listen. I write, my heart has always been in the story. Everything else was secondary. Somewhere in becoming what I was I lost sight of that. I lost sight of me. My goal was always to write for film and I was so wrapped up in working or looking for the next job that I completely missed the point. No wonder I felt lost. I was! That moment was my epiphany - and what an epiphany it was. Utterly powerful in ways that words can't do it justice. The mountain was showing me my heart. Untamed, unchained and in it's purest form. I never wanted to leave. I felt a peace that I can't describe. I was so afraid that if I left I was going to lose that clarity of vision I was feeling. (and there are moments where I do.) Choices. Now, just because I found my path again doesn't mean it's all sunshine, roses and easy. On the contrary, it meant I would have to make some choices. Not just any choices but some really tough ones. To go this path would mean to give up another that meant a great deal to me. Something else I loved. You see, there are consequences to choices - there always is. The real question is never what they are. The real question is always "Can you live with them"? The answer is simpler than one might think. If you fail or if you succeed doesn't matter as much as living with the fact that you never tried. When I think about which would be worse to me - that's what it comes back too. Could I live with failing? Yes. Could I live with not trying? No. You'd think there would be a fair degree of fear - surprisingly - there was none. Just this feeling of utter and complete rightness. My world made sense to me again. And thus a new journey was about to begin and an old one was about to come to it's end. The Moment of Truth. The end of October came. Over a year had past since I sat on that faithful mountain. My eyes were fixed on the paperwork for hours. The phone beside me, I kept picking up the receiver, hanging it back up. Picking it up again, dialing, hanging back up. The final digit in the telephone number was dialed a half dozen times or more. I felt nauseous. If I was ever going to do it, now would be the time. The industry had been slow that past year and going into winter meant it wasn't going to get any better. The timing was perfect. The pieces were in place. These are the moments of your life when you find out exactly who you are and what you're made of. Are you going to talk the talk or walk the walk? I made the call. I took my leave. I said it was temporary but in my heart I knew this is probably more of a permanent choice. When I hung up the phone there was a sense of relief and of loss at the same time. When I walked back into the house I was physically ill. This was harder than I thought it would be. It was, in a way, saying goodbye to an old life. One I had outgrown on many levels - but still one I loved. It defined me as a person. It had in fact defined who I was. It still does. I think when film is in your veins it's something that never leaves. It's a deeply rooted part of you that few people understand. I know that a great many people thought that I had taken leave of my senses. The numerous emails of "You're ruining a perfectly good career.", "Have you lost your f'ing mind?" were all note of that. I felt I had found them again. I still do. Despite anything. In fact, I had found something far more important. Alone on that mountain - I had found myself again. When I doubt, I take myself back to that mountain and I try to remembered that clarity. It's comes as if I'm still there. © 2007 Sanctuary Read More... How I Met A Girl... Posted By: Atnevon - January.3.2008, 07:03AM - Comments (0) The Party Lights I wasn't a dancer and I wasn't usually too eager to put myself in the public's eye, but two shots of tequila and a 'Red Headed Slut' (honest, it's a drink) put me on the dance floor in almost no time flat. The music pulsed and buzzed through everything around me, and I could feel the bass vibrating through the floor, just begging my body to move along with the beat. The lights were swirling and dancing over the crowd in a barrage of multi-colored magic, moving back and forth and coming in brilliant flashes of white with the peaks of the music. Before I even realized it, my body gave into the flow of the music and started to move along with the crowd. A girl nearby turned toward me and started to dance a bit closer as we began to focus in on one another, our bodies moving up and down with the pace. I blinked and she was gone, then I blinked again and she was back with her friend at her side. My pulse quickened, but my body slowed down to dance smoother now with the music as the girls closed in on me, dancing at both sides in a sandwich kind of effect. As the song hit a quiet beat, one of the girls leaned toward my ear and said "My name's Trish, what's yours?" in that slightly slurred tone that couldn't be confused for anything but being tipsy. Then, as the shots started to catch up with me a little more, I asked myself one of those all-important questions when you're drunk... "How the hell did I get here?" Coming Of Age Puberty hit me like a freight train at the age of 13. At first, I didn't really realize it had hit me, but after a few weeks it was pretty difficult to ignore what was going on with my body. I'd break out in sweats in the middle of class, my underarms became swamps of odor and wetness that showed me just how necessary deodorant can be when you're in public places, and hair started to grow on my body in places I never imagined it could. Now, normally this wouldn't be such a big deal, as by the age of 13, almost everyone in American school systems has been educated on just what happens through the process of growing up, however, in my unfortunate case, things didn't coast along quite so smoothly as they did for most during this time. You see, I was never really the popular one in school, and only a few years prior to this, I had gained a reputation as being the stinky fat kid in class. Hitting puberty was, to me, just one more excuse for the rest of the school to make fun of me. And let me just say that they used that opportunity with every chance they could find. I'll be honest and say that I wasn't the most tormented kid in the world; I probably wasn't even the most tormented at the school I went to, but if there were a top ten list of losers that went to my school, I'd put a good bet down on the fact that I'd be on it. I remember in junior high when girls used to ask me repeatedly for my phone number during study hall period. The first time it happened I was pretty na�ve about the whole thing and didn't have much of a problem in giving it out, but it wasn't long after this that I realized the whole thing was just a little game they were playing with their friends so that they could prank call me the next night. At the time, the idea of me getting a real date was about as probable as Vanilla Ice making a come back in the music industry a few years later. After a while the jokes died down and people found other things and other people to make fun of, so I decided to find myself a nice quiet seat in the back of class and just keep my mouth shut most of the time. For me, being ignored and forgotten seemed a much better alternative to being picked on and made fun of. It wasn't too long until I started to really excel at school, and I started to make up for my lack of self-esteem with good grades I could bring home to my parents for them to praise. "Great job," they'd say, and "I know you'll go to a great college when it comes time," but somehow I could always see in their eyes that they wished I could be more popular. They'd never say it of course, but my father tried almost relentlessly to get me involved in any kind of sport he could, and I remember late nights when my mother would make sure to remind me to turn out the light and go to sleep while I was in the middle of a good book. Youth Group One of the ultimate truths to the world is that the more you try to escape society, the more lonely you start to feel inside. You begin to wish secretly that you could belong to something, just for the sake of belonging. Some of us find hobbies, some of us go on road trips, and some of us find groups of people we can try to relate to. I settled on the latter route. At the time, church had a very different meaning for me than it did for most people. Most people use church as a way that they can sort out for themselves their questions, and even fears, about life, death, and the ways of the world. Some even think that so long as you live a good life in general, and make it to church every so often, that you'll be rewarded later on in life for it. However, for a child, church means something else. It means going to Bible study and hoping to be rewarded with candy for memorizing the right quotes. It means singing, and clapping, and having a good time while the pastor isn't speaking. Church becomes all about fun and games instead of being about anything serious. A child doesn't really know what sin is, and a child doesn't really grasp the concept of the world. And, when a child is raised to go to church every Sunday, it doesn't strengthen their religion, it just strengthens a routine that they're used to. With all this in mind, I was glad to accept when I was asked to join the church youth group. I figured, in the back of my mind, that it would be a good chance for me to get out on Sundays and maybe even find some friends. The first few meetings seemed a lot like Bible study was during the day, with a few fun and games mixed in. If there was any difference at all, it was that youth group took place at night instead of during the daytime. Then came time for my initiation... I remember showing up to the church that night with no idea just what to expect. Never before had I actually been to an initiation, and no one had given a clear answer to me as to what it actually involved. If you asked them about it, they'd say things like "I hope you're not scared of lizards or snakes," as scare tactics to get you thinking, but they'd never give you any details when you asked. It wasn't long until the other new boy in the group showed up, and the older members of the group led us eagerly into the church basement. When I first saw the dress I thought it had to be a joke... a prop as another means to scare people a little more before the actual initiation began. Unfortunately, I was wrong. This red satin dress stood there before me in their arms. They told me I'd heave to put it on if I wanted to join the group. At first I just stood there, in an awe stricken state, and wondering if this was really happening. When you're a 13 year old boy, there's not much else in your world to worry about except for your reputation, and if anyone ever knew I had to wear a dress for this, I was completely certain that I was doomed to a life full or torment that would never end. Unwilling as the thoughts were in my head, I still wanted to joint he group, so I slid the dress over the top of my clothes, and hoped that it would all be over soon. Little did I know that it had all just begun. Next up were the makeup jobs they had prepared for us both. When I looked into the mirror after they were done, I saw the face of a demented clown looking back at me. In my head I was already screaming of embarrassment, and I just kept telling myself it was almost over. "As soon as we get a good look at ourselves in the mirror, then they'll let us take off the dresses and wash our faces off," I told myself, but somehow I couldn't convince myself of it, and I knew there would be more to come. It didn't end with the jewelry, the fake earrings, or the wigs. It didn't end with the Polaroid shots that would capture this very moment forever, and it didn't end with a drive through town on our way to an unknown destination. No, no, no, it ended instead at a local dine in pizza place after we'd been there for two hours, sitting right in the middle of the public's eye. The waiter even asked us if we had been in some kind of Broadway musical as he tried to figure out what why two teenage boys would be dressed in really bad drag. We just shook our heads 'no' and he got this funny look in his face before he decided to just leave the subject alone. I was absolutely certain that someone I knew would see me and point out who I was to the rest of the crowded restaurant, but to my surprise no one did. A year or so later, the youth group leader left the group to pursue the rest of his life, and the group disappeared shortly after. Then the church hired a new youth group leader from another nearby church to come start up a new youth group, and while most of the old group was gone, I was still around to join the new one. Sadly though, this new group wasn't really one I could find my bearings in. There were no bible study sessions, and there weren't really any long talks about the troubles life can bring your way when you're young. Youth group became more like a church sports group filled with activities to bring in as many people as possible. And while it worked as far as getting more members, it only made me feel like a loner again. Water It all started with a canoe trip. The youth group was going to go to a little camp ground in the middle of the woods and spend the weekend there. There were a few different activities that would be taking place, but the highlight of the trip was to be a long canoe ride down the Fox River. Each of us paired off and got into our canoes, preparing for the long trip. Scott and I were in the third canoe of the line, and we each honestly thought that the trip would be just another boring ride without any kind of climax, and for the majority of the trip we were right. Bushes and trees and long grass passed by endlessly. There were no rapids and there wasn't any magnificent scenery to look at. All we really had to do was to keep the canoe straight so that it didn't drift sideways. Then, after about an hour, the river split two separate ways, and we followed the other two boats toward the left. With a narrower path, the river started to pick up its pace some, and things started to seem a bit less boring. Suddenly, the rapids made their appearance. Ahead, the water seemed to twist and turn with high spots and low spots scatted among the white water splashing against the rocks. To the right the water seemed too rocky to be able to pass through, and to the left a canoe was turned upside down and lie sideways across part of the river, blocking off what must have been too dangerous to go through. The trick, we decided, would be to get close enough to the canoe on the left to avoid the rocky rapids on the right. Unfortunately, things didn't quite go as planned. The first boat went through fine without a problem, then the second boat passed through, nearly colliding with the upside down canoe, but still safely making it through the rapids. Before we even realized it, our boat was turning sideways, and it became all we could do just to keep it going straight. Quickly approaching us was the canoe block, and it seemed at first as though we should be able to clear it so long as we could manage to keep our boat straight, but we didn't leave ourselves enough room for error, and the water hit us hard from the right, driving us full force into the canoe. I soared into the air from the front end of the boat, screaming the only words I could think of at the time, just before I plunged into the water. "Oh shit!" I'd been an experienced swimmer, but I wasn't experienced enough to know what to do when I couldn't tell up from down. The water was turning me every which way to the point where nothing was making sense, and after a few minutes of struggling I started to really being to think that I might not make it to the surface. My whole life suddenly seemed like an empty void of all the things I'd wished I'd done, and I wished to God that I could have made something more of it than I did. And, as if that thought alone had done it, my body broke through the surface and I gasped for breath. Scott came up a few seconds later, and we managed to make our way to the shore with our tipped canoe. With some considerable effort we managed to empty the water out of it enough to make it the rest of the trip. After I sat back down I noticed my vision seemed a bit off, and then I realized I'd lost my glasses in the river, but for the first time I seemed to really be seeing the world for what it was, glasses or no glasses. It wasn't an unfamiliar reflection anymore. Megan After I'd managed to change into something a bit less... damn, I made my way back with the rest of the group, and at moments when the group was split up a bit I started to hear rumors of a girl in the group named Megan that had a crush on me. Being that I'd never actually even conceived the idea of someone having a crush on me, I pushed it aside as just another cruel joke, but something about it sparked my interest and I couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to actually go out on a date. A few days later Megan passed me a note that told me simply that what I had heard was true, and that it wasn't just some kind of joke. At first I was in shock, but a few phone calls later it hit me that there was actually someone out there who thought that I was dating material. The only problem? My age. You see, when you're only 16 years old there's a lot of things that you still have yet to accomplish; things like getting a job, or saving up money, or, in my case, being able to drive a car. I already had a car that I'd bought from a generous relative, and I already had a license to drive it, but unfortunately, what I didn't have was the money to pay for the insurance. So, my big boat of a car was effectively just one hell of a paperweight. Not being able to drive pretty much puts a damper on your social life when you're a kid, and it makes dating near impossible. So, with all this in mind, I decided to tell Megan that we should wait until I was able to take her out before we started dating. To try to stimulate our relationship before I could take her out, she invited me and a few other friends over for a movie night at her house, and 'conveniently' her other friends left us alone to go run some errands before the night began. Being that I'd never really been with anyone before and I'd never really even carried on a real conversation with anyone other than adults, I was lost for words. Spending an hour alone talking with a girl who was close to my age was probably one of the most stressful situations I could imagine at the time. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what I was supposed to do, and I didn't know how to keep things rolling along smoothly without stuttering all over myself. By the end of the evening I was kicking myself for not having been more relaxed, and I was feeling sorry for myself, yet again, for being such a loser. Not long after, I managed up the strength to give her a call and try to have a conversation with her over the phone. At first it took a bit of time for the conversation to really get going, with long pauses of silence scattered everywhere throughout the conversation, but after about twenty minutes I started to become a bit more relaxed and I realized that all I had to do was try to be myself and not worry about trying to say all the right things. It wasn't long before I started to call her almost every night, but sadly the relationship never had a good chance to evolve past that point, and since I wasn't getting any closer to that job I longed for, she wrote me another note, saying how we should just be friends and move on with our lives. Once again, I'd lost any hope of being someone important in someone else's life. Fight Gym class is a scary thing when you're a nerdy freshman in high school. You're thrown onto a field of guys who have twice the muscle you do, and who are five times as aggressive, with no other defenses except for a coach that always seems to be looking the other way. After a few weeks we started to get to learn the track, and the coach started making us run almost every other day. The sad thing about an outdoor track is the fact that there is almost always an endless supply of gravel stones lying around it for others to pick up and hurl at the people they don't like. And, judging from the welts on my back, not many people in that class liked me too much. Through some twisted logic, ninety percent of the kids with behavior problems ended up being in my gym class, and nobody seemed to think there was a problem with this except for me. It got to the point where I'd lie in bed awake late at night debating whether or not to fake sick if we had to run the next day in gym class. Wishing and praying for another life, I'd lie there, knowing that the wish I had would never come true, and that it would never stop. About three months later... I snapped. We had a substitute teacher for P.E. that day, and, of course, everyone felt a bit more free about throwing things than they did when the regular coach was there. I remember running around the track halfway through class when about ten or fifteen of the kids in the class all lined up ahead of me and bent down to tie their shoes at the same time. My back started hurting just from the thought of the pelting that was about to come, and like a frightened rabbit being hunted by a pack of wolves, I turned around and ran the other way. In my fear I told the substitute what was going on, and he used his great courage and wisdom to yell out to the rest of the class to "stop throwing rocks you guys, somebody could get hurt!" I knew I was a dead man. At the substitute's direction I started to run around the track again, this time in the right direction, and yet again, the group all bent down on their knees at once to tie their shoes. A few seconds later I felt the first stone hit my back. Another followed, then another, then another, each seemingly hitting harder and harder into my back as I pushed as hard as I could with my legs to get away from it all. Then something incredible happened. As soon as the next stone hit me, I turned around toward the group and started to approach them slowly. My hands closed into tight fists, and I screamed out at them. "You're going to fucking die!" One of the things I'll never, in my life, forget is the look of shock I saw in the other boy's face as I threw the first punch. For a moment I paused as I saw a small streak of red on my right hand, and then I punched again with my left. He fell back with the second hit, and the instant I hesitated I was grabbed by the other members of the group, held still so that I could be punched back again and again by the one I'd just struck. After a few hits they let me go, and I thought that it was done with. Later, in the hallway, I found out otherwise. Before I even knew what had happened, I was flying down towards the ground, and blows were being delivered one after another into my chest. My glasses flew off my face as I went down, and for a second all I could think about was whether or not they were going to get broken. By the time the next blow hit me, my glasses were the furthest thing from my mind. In the principal's office Tim and I sat side by side, attempting to explain our sides of the story. Tim said that he hadn't thrown rocks, and since no one else had actually witnessed either of the fights that took place that day (including the substitute gym coach that was supposed to be watching over things), we were both given Saturday school detentions instead of being suspended. Our parents would soon bicker back and forth with the school administration over the whole thing, but we both just went out separate ways and tried to forget the whole thing had ever happened. The strangest thing about the whole event was that after that day, even though I hadn't really won any fights, no one really tormented me much more in gym class that year. I never felt another rock strike my back, and I never again had to be the shy one that wouldn't fight back. Maybe I'm not proud of what I did that day, but at the same time I will never regret it for a second. Letter To The Editor After all the things I'd been through at school, I began to hate it more and more with every passing day. No longer was high school just a grueling experience I had to endure to make it on to the rest of my life. It was instead my private hell. All my hatred and all my anger toward the school finally boiled its way to the surface, and I started to write. I wrote about how much I hated what the school was doing to me, and how I hated the way they were spending their money, and how I hated the teachers that I didn't think were competent enough to teach. Everything I had inside of me went down on paper, and I sent my rant off to the local newspaper as a letter to the editor so that the whole town could see how unhappy I was. When my family saw my letter in the paper they all told me how proud they were of me for having something I wrote published. The school, however, had a slightly different reaction to the whole situation. My keyboarding instructor jumped down my throat about the letter as soon as I walked into the classroom, saying how disrespectful it was towards the school, and how hateful my letter was. At the time I basically just shrugged her off, but later she made a call to my parents, suggesting to them that I would be best to drop out of her class. Towards the end of the day, one of my former teachers pulled me out of a class I was in to literally start screaming at me in the hallway, telling me how unfair and bias my letter was, and how I didn't have the right to have the opinion I did. I told him that I was just writing down what I felt about the school, but he just kept on yelling and screaming at me to the point where he was red in the face and I was scared he was going to hit me. By the following day, I was face to face with the principal again. In a sad kind of way it seemed funny to me that I could even be in the principal's office for something I didn't even do in school, but there I was. Luckily, the principal was a bit more reasonable about everything, to my surprise, and he asked me why I was so fed up with the school. To my surprise he actually listened to what I had to say, and while things didn't change quite the way I wanted them to, he managed to at least give me reasons for why things were the way they were, instead of saying that it was his job to worry about it and not mine. It was probably the first time I'd had an intelligent conversation with someone outside my family, and it put me at ease to see that maybe there was hope for things to improve. Mr. Miller Before I knew it, my sophomore year of high school had come, and I came to meet a number of truly exceptional people. The first of which was a drafting and CAD teacher by the name of Howard Miller, whose teachings I will probably never forget in my lifetime. The first day of class set the tone for the rest of the year. Mr. Miller stood up before us and proposed something that, to us, sounded like complete lunacy. He told us that the world did not spin. This almost immediately caused a soft roar of argument from the class. We knew from every science book we'd ever read and every other instructor we'd had that this was wrong. He urged us to let him speak his mind, and so we did. His argument went something like this: If the world really were spinning on its axis like everyone said it did, then it would turn a full revolution in just a 24 hour period of time. Considering just how big the Earth itself is, this would mean the globe was turning at hundreds of miles per hour. We could accept this though, because our feet generally stay attached to the ground, so while the world is spinning, we too are spinning with it. However, Miller pointed out to us that if we jumped into the air, with nothing to keep us in place, that a wall or a tree or anything else that might be beside us should hit us like a semi truck before we hit the ground. Without giving us a chance for protest he jumped into the air. The wall never came near him. He fell down to the ground in virtually the same spot he'd leapt from, and at first none of us could say anything. Then we all burst out into argument at once. We told him he was crazy and that his theories made no sense, but the truth of the matter was that none of us could really prove him wrong, even though we knew he had to be. Our minds worked hard at the problem. For a good fifteen or twenty minutes we were arguing back and forth with him, trying to find flaws in his logic, when we finally arrived on the solution. Momentum. If you jump from a moving car, your body doesn't just sit where it lands, it rolls for quite a ways in the same direction as the car was going. Why? Because your body has momentum. It has to have a force move directly against it before it can come to rest. The same thing is true of your body on the Earth. When you jump into the air your body doesn't just stop moving, it keeps flying in the same direction the world is turning in because there is no other force to stop it. Now, this may not seem like a breakthrough in modern science, because it's been known for a long time, but to students that had never had a physics class and who had never heard a lecture on the laws of motion, it was quite something to have figured out without any kind of outside assistance. For the rest of the year Mr. Miller was always making us think about things like this... things that might not have much to do with drafting, but that applied to the rest of our lives. He was the first teacher I had that really made me feel like I was being challenged instead of just being spoon fed. Tech Kings Due to lack of enrollment in higher level drafting classes, the school had threatened to cancel the higher level classes all together and leave the five or six students in those classes to try to find other subjects to enroll in that hadn't yet been filled up. Instead of forcing them out of drafting, Mr. Miller decided to take on a rather interesting challenge as a teacher. He volunteered to teach all three classes at one time. To balance out the class some, he split us all up into five groups of four. This way, even though the lower level drafting class that I was in was bigger than the two higher level classes combined, there wasn't one huge group versus two little groups to compete for attention. It instead turned into five groups working individually with each other to solve problems. When a group as a whole couldn't solve a problem together, then they would call Mr. Miller in for assistance and he would give hints as to how to find an answer. The end result was something like a small business, working in teams to solve specific problems then putting their work next to everyone else's to form a finished product. I was assigned to a group that would later call itself the Tech Kings, which was, coincidentally, the only group in the class that had girls in it (yes ladies, that really is the first thing a guy's mind focuses on, even at so early an age). Our group was pretty different from one another, and we probably never would have even started talking to each other if it wasn't for that class. Mike was more of a popular guy. He was tall and slender, and his interests lied mainly in things like stereo equipment, bass boxes, and sports. His hair cut was always up to speed, and he didn't seem to get nervous very easily. Anne was probably the closest person to me out of the group. She presented herself as more of an academically minded girl, and she was arguably the best draftsperson we had that year. As far as looks went, she probably wouldn't stand out too much in a crowd, but she had that lure to her that could make you fall for her after one conversation. Socially, she had all the qualities I lacked. It didn't seem hard for her to fit into almost any group, and she was always there to hold ours together. At first I thought I was going to hate Melissa. Like so many of the girls that had tormented me in my earlier years, she had the perfect body and the kind of popularity I'd grown to despise. It wasn't until I really started talking to her that I realized there was a lot more to people than the way they appeared. Melissa wasn't as infatuated with how she looked as most girls were at her age, and she was actually very smart about life, if you took the chance to listen to her. In the middle of it all was me, the quiet, shy kid that did pretty well as far as drafting went, but didn't really talk too much. Slowly, I began to look forward to going to drafting. It wasn't because I was good at it, and it wasn't so I could drool over the two pretty girls in class. It was because of the conversations we had, and the group of friends I had found. The Tech Kings seemed like "Breakfast Club" group of teens, about as opposite from each other as we could get, but we worked amazingly well together and managed to become the fastest group in the class to get things done. It was the first time in my life that I can say I really felt like I had friends I could depend on. Nerd Meanwhile, in my English class, I'd grown to hate school more and more. We were stuck writing the same thing over and over again, in different formats to make it seem more varied than it was. Our teacher liked to pride herself on the results her students received on the state writing tests because she could make us learn to master the format they graded by. One of the problems with this was that all we did for months on end was practice the same style of writing. Attention getter, thesis, body one, body two, body three, conclusion... over and over and over again. We started doing drills at least once a week where we would have one period to turn in five to ten handwritten pages, and the more we did this, the more we started to hate the writing process. Nothing was creative, and writing a paper seemed more like busy work to us than it did expression. About the only creativity we were allowed for this style of writing was the ability to creatively bullshit between statements in order to make a paper seem longer. (Pardon my French) School was hitting me hard in other areas too. I was starting to see more and more each day how little I could fit into any kind of group, and how impossible it would be for me to ever find someone I could fall in love with. As most teen depressions go, mine quickly went from bad to rock bottom. In my head were fantasies of the ways I could kill myself, and when we were given the opportunity to write a descriptive sketch assignment, I had an idea that topped all the others I'd had before. For the first time since my letter to the editor, I started to write from what I felt inside, instead of just filling in the holes of an outline to make the paper come out right. I wrote of a room with a floor soaked in blood. Slowly, as I drew out the picture in my head with my writing, I moved the reader's attention away from the floor and up towards a tormented figure hanging from a rope in the ceiling... my figure. As I wrote, all the hurt and all the anger and all the pain I'd felt over the past few years came out, and all that I could think about was how perfect this one last paper would be as a suicide note. Then reality caught me off guard and told me that I didn't have the guts to go through with what I was writing... I didn't even have any rope. So, with some reluctance, I put my hand on the backspace key, and watched my paper disappear away. When I reached the part of the paper that described the blood soaked floor I suddenly had an idea and took my hand back from the keyboard. Through some tweaking and some thought, I started to write again. This time, however, the victim wasn't me; it was the rest of the world that had treated me so badly. My words would draw a picture of a classroom with thirty dead bodies lying in it, all shot painfully before they could escape the room, and in the corner of the room that was in my head lie a book of my life and the torture I'd been through. As I put the title on it I knew I'd written something real this time. I called it 'Nerd.' When my teacher first read it, she thought it was one of the most daring descriptive sketches she'd seen, and she put it in a writing contest for the area. Three weeks later, in a small Arkansas school, another tortured kid told his friends he was going to do something on one would ever forget. After he pulled the fire alarm he waited outside the school for everyone to start pouring out of the building, and from the distance he started shooting, picking off one after another, teacher and student alike. It changed the face of schools across America forever. More directly, it changed the course of my life. A few days after the shooting my story made it into the hands of the judges for the writing contest, and it didn't exactly go over too well. Most of the students who attended the writing fair were called up to the stage for honorable mention, and those that had written exceptional pieces of writing were called up for first, second, and third place awards, but my name was never called. About a week later I got my paper back from the judges. Written over it in red ink were comments from one of the judges in particular, saying how disturbed I was to have written this piece, and how I should probably seek counseling. The teachers that heard about my paper seemed a bit hesitant around me, and it threw me right back into the state of depression I had before I wrote it. A Gun Without A Bullet It was 3 o'clock and no one else was home. My lips were tight around the barrel of my father's rifle and I was reaching down to the trigger when I realized that it wasn't loaded. In all the confusion and desperation, I'd forgotten to load the gun, and I made a desperate scramble to find ammunition. Finally, I found a box of bullets in a dresser drawer and took a few minutes to try to figure out how to load the gun. I moved the gun back towards my mouth and leaned forward to feel the cold metal touch of the barrel against my lips. For a second, I laughed a little at the thought that this was my first real kiss, and then I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. To this day I can't be sure why the gun didn't go off. It might have been the bullet, it might have been the gun, it might have been that I just didn't know how to use it right, or it might have been the touch of a higher power. I'll never be sure, but whatever it was that stopped the gun from firing, I'm thankful for it today. The whole world felt like it was ending for me at the time, but what I found out later was that everyone has their ups and everyone has their downs. It's all part of life. This was just one of my down times, and if I let them, better things would find me. #XPA I didn't have the courage to try the trigger again, and I didn't have the strength to find another way, so instead I turned myself where the desperate turn when they're sad and lonely... the internet. There was a chat room that I frequented called X-Philes Anonymous, for fans of the popular T.V. show. About 20 or 30 people showed up regularly, and after every airing of the show we'd all get together online and talk about what we thought of the episode. From the outside it seemed like a bunch of sci-fi freaks and nerds, but from the inside it was a tightly knit group of friends that could all relate to each other. A lot of the die hard fans swore they'd never stop chatting there until the show died or they did. Smee was the youngest of the crowd, she had that kind of amusing personality that could at times show you just how young she was, and at other times just make you laugh until it hurt. Next came Nut, who didn't naturally speak English, but seemed fluent enough to get along in every day conversation, along with being able to shed some insights he had on the show. Parabola and Pavement weren't quite so frequent to visit, but they had both been there for as long as I could remember. In the middle of the group was myself, CyberMind, the virtual king of the internet and one of the most dedicated fans there were. I didn't always have so much to say, but I was always there for people if they needed me, and I could listen to anyone talk about their problems without throwing back any ridiculing remarks or judging situations I hadn't myself encountered. I'd talk with people all over the world who could sympathize with my problems and relate to where I was coming from. Being that we were all major science fiction fans, it was a safe bet that most of us led similar lifestyles and weren't unfamiliar with being called nerds or geeks. We knew that most of us weren't the most popular ones, but we'd learned to accept that in our lives, and we became friends through having shared loneliness. On this night in particular, there was a new person in the room who went by the name of LadyKinbo that I ended up getting into a conversation with. It turned out that she had a very dedicated writing background and after hearing what I'd been through with my paper, she took a few minutes to read over 'Nerd' and gave me some real insight into what I'd written. Her comments helped to balance out those of the judges and it helped to calm me down just knowing that not everyone thought my ideas were so disturbed. A Wish By the next day my depression was back. It hit me full force on the way to school, tearing at my mind and reminding me of all the events of the day before. Feeling sorry for myself was something I'd grown to be very good at by this point in my life, and if they made it into an Olympic sport I'm sure I'd have gone for the gold. You know those moments when everything just slips away from you and you forget completely what you're doing? Well, that moment for me was stretching into hours, and by the time I made it to drafting I barely even knew who I was. I just sat there, looking at the lines of my drawing and not really knowing what I should draw next. Melissa seemed to have sensed something was wrong and leaned over to ask me if I was alright. While nothing seemed alright, I tried to deny the obvious at first so I didn't have to bring other people into my troubles, but she asked a few more times if I was okay, and I finally broke down and told her the whole story. I told her about my writing and about Megan and about how nothing felt right in my life. And then she told me that everything would work out in the end. While the words weren't so long and drawn out as those that you'd read in books of the perfect world, they were what I really needed to hear at the time, and they had managed to make the tears forming in my eyes fade slowly away. My depression didn't fade instantly away, but it had managed to calm itself into a mild sadness instead of a suicidal urge. I knew at that moment that I really did have a friend that cared about me in the real world, and just having that one friend was enough to turn my life around quite a bit. Maybe in another lifetime I would have asked Melissa out on a date, but in this life I'd convinced myself that I would never be good enough for her tastes. Every day I had my own reflection in the mirror to show me how ugly I was, and I knew in my heart that someone so beautiful as her would never fall for me. I knew this because I'd convinced myself of it, in the same way I'd convinced myself that the world was always laughing at me behind my back, and it would take years to convince myself otherwise. Perhaps my biggest regret in life is never having found out what her answer would have been if I had asked her. Poem Anne was crying when I walked into the room. While she wouldn't admit what was wrong at first, it became slowly clear that she'd suffered a broken heart. At this point in time I didn't really know what it meant to have loved and lost. Hell, I didn't even really know what it meant to truly be in love with someone in the first place. From my point of view, love was one of those things that I'd only seen in books and fairy tale movies. But, what I did know about love was that it was a power that could make you feel like you were someone special, and it could make you feel like you really truly belonged to something. Being that I'd never felt like I belonged anywhere, I had a great deal of understanding to just how lonely it could be to feel like you weren't a part of the world. With this in mind, I put my pencil to paper and found the courage to write again, but this time I didn't write about how much I hated the world, or how much loneliness I felt in my heart. Instead I thought deeply about what it was that kept me going from day to day, and I somehow managed to turn that feeling into words. "Love is like running your hand up a rose. It's thorny and painful for a long time, but at the end waits the soft and gentle blossom." Maybe it was only a couple sentences, and maybe it ended up meaning nothing special to her, but it was the first time I'd ever really looked into my heart and put it down on paper. Writing it down made me miss more what I had never had. Afterward, writing started to become a habit to me. Every chance I got, I tried to look at things in new ways and to try to put emotions into words that I hadn't been able to say before. As I wrote more and more I started to draw some attention to my work from the people around me, and I even started a mailing list that I'd send emails to daily with my little writings in them. In a strange sort of way, it made me feel like my life actually meant something. Elyse People who are dedicated to sports or music or art often times ignore the rest of the world so that they can focus on that interest alone. What they forget is that some of the greatest athletes only won their medals because all their lives the world told them that they couldn't do it. Some of the greatest songs were sung only out of the pain and heartbreak of the song writers, and some of the greatest paintings were only painted after the artists behind them had been through an incredible experience. It takes real life to make something beautiful, and that's what gave Elyse her allure to me. I'd spent my whole life taking honors courses and being surrounded by people whose main goals in life were to get good grades, and I'd started to notice that there wasn't much else that they thought about. I knew that if I asked an A+ student to define love for me, they might be able to quote some great words of a forgotten poet, but they wouldn't ever be able to tell me what it means to put your soul into someone else. When I met Elyse I knew that I'd found someone special. She was the kind of person who thought a lot more about things than most people had taken the time to, and she was a lot more down to earth than most of the other people I'd met in my classes. Life had given her a fair share of experiences with the trials it can put a person through. Over the first few weeks that we had started to hang out together I had become infatuated with the idea of dating her. In my mind she seemed like she would have been perfect for me. It wasn't just that she was smart, and it wasn't just that she was pretty; it was her ability to see the world for what it really was instead of just drifting through it like everyone else did. Unfortunately for me, in addition to all these wonderful things that were hers, she had a boyfriend that she'd grown to love just as much as I longed for her. Time showed me that she could always be there for me as a friend, but time also showed me that I was unlikely to be a candidate for anyone's consideration in the dating pool... or at least not at the time. Stephanie My loneliness started me talking more and more with the people I'd found over the internet, and in my desperation I started to live more of my life in the computer than I did in real life. Life online seemed much more promising to me than anything else, and it met me with a much greater welcome than I could find anywhere else. In life I was a nerdy little fat kid that couldn't even get up enough courage to ask out a girl, but in the online world, I was more like a star. There were times when I could go into a random chat room and run into someone else who either knew me or who had at least heard of me. Instead of being ridiculed, I was looked up to, and instead of being laughed at, people actually listened to the things I had to say. Within the bounds of the safe little world I'd drawn myself into I could be the center of the crowd, instead of just the shy kid. LadyKinbo, the girl who I first started talking to after I'd written 'Nerd' started to talk with me more and more. Her real name, I found out, was Stephanie, and she had lived through quite and interesting life. Though I'd only seen bits and pieces of her life until we really started dating, I knew that she had been through much harder times than I could ever imagine, and I knew she was no stranger to pain. Like most teenagers, I felt like my life and my hardships were as bad as any could ever be, and in an effort to prove to Stephanie just how hard things had been for me I started to exaggerate my family life to a small extent and I made situations that really meant nothing in the long run out to be things that would scar me emotionally forever. Put simply, I became a drama queen... er king. But even through my ramblings and rantings about nothing, Stephanie and I managed to fall in love with the idea of being with each other. And, as time passed by, we grew closer to one another. It was a perfect life, in an online world. Summer Time It was the summer after my sophomore year in high school, and my parents were starting to get on my case for not having a real job as of yet. At first I tried to make excuses, saying that the more I worked on the computer, the more qualified I would be to have a high paying job in the future, but all my excuses managed to get me nowhere with them. On a bright summer day at six in the morning, my dad woke me up and told me I was going to work with him, whether I liked it or not. Panic hit, stronger than any coffee ever brewed. Working with my father meant strenuous physical activity, and for someone like me, that was as unfamiliar with pushing his own body as an Amish person was to high-end stereo equipment, this meant certain death. You see, my dad was a drywaller, and he had the kind of muscle to him that would make even the incredible hulk cringe in terror. After years and years of doing drywall, his body was built for it, but as for me, I'd never really put in a hard day's work in my lifetime. The closest thing to weight lifting I'd ever done was carrying cartons of milk from the car to the refrigerator. Every day, while my dad was at work, I was sitting at home eating ice cream and playing video games. Sure, at one point in time I had high hopes of becoming thin, but after over a dozen different diets I had pretty much given up on the idea of losing weight and just decided to accept the fact that I'd probably be fat for the rest of my life. Everything changed over that summer. Among my first worries about going to work for my dad was not being able to nail in the sheets of drywall without bending the nails so badly that we'd have to start all over again. My coordination with a hammer was definitely not the best in the world, and if you put my fingers anywhere within a foot or so of where the hammer should land, you could put a good bet down on the hammer hitting my fingers before it ever touched the nail. Luckily (or at least I thought), I was assigned to scrapping duty, which involved very little coordination. All I had to do was to move the cut off edges of unused drywall outside of the house and into the dump truck. To me, this seemed like it should be one of the easiest jobs in the world. It seemed that way for about the first fifteen minutes, and then I realized just how wrong I was. The problem with scrapping isn't so much taking each load to the truck and walking back, and it's not figuring out how much to pick up more than a few small sheets at once. The problem with scrapping is that a typical two-story house can easily contain a ton or so of scrap material to carry out. In 100 degree weather with no air conditioning, this kind of job could take you from standing to near crawling in only the first few hours if you were as out of shape as I was. By the end of the first week I was desperate to find ways to make the days seem more endurable, and I came across running. Every evening after I'd finished scrapping and made it back home I would take fifteen minutes or more to just run as hard and as fast as my legs could take me. The way I figured it, all this running would give me more endurance and allow me to be able to make it through the days without passing out, and in that respect, it did start to help. However, at the same time the running did something that I never expected... it made me lose weight. World Changers Towards the end of summer there was an event my church youth group was going to called World Changers. It was an effort for youth groups around the state to come together and help to build and rebuild homes in a low-income neighborhood in order to draw attention to the Christian faith. During the course of a week we were to get as much work done as we could during the day, and then attend church services every night. Everyone whose house we worked on was invited to these services, but no one was required to come outside of the group of volunteers themselves. In principal, the idea was very generous. As the week wore on we all started to see that this was going to be a bit harder than most of us had thought it would be, and we saw that there was quite a bit of work that had to go into these houses. But, even through the strain of it all, we managed to become good friends, and we were having a good time doing hard work by the end of the week. Yet, there was something about this whole trip that had been bothering me in the back of my head, and it didn't hit me until we were about ready to leave. In all these homes we were remodeling, the people we were doing this for were either weak Christians or weren't Christian at all. In essence, our job was not so much to do a good deed, it was more to bribe these people into coming to the church and becoming strong Christians. All this seemed oddly similar to another profession I'd known from the real world. We were salespeople for God. Everything we had done was not much more than a big event to raise media attention and get us mentioned here and there for what we had done. Our noble cause to do nice things for these people had turned into a big T.V. commercial that was on all the local news channels. And, as the week came to a close I started to see people from the event talking with homeowners and trying to convince them that their ways were wrong, and that they should accept god into their lives so they might be able to live at peace. Coming Back To School Through all the events of the summer, my first day back at school seemed to hit me before I even knew it was there. At first there didn't seem much for me to look forward to, but then when I walked into my drafting class and saw Melissa standing there I remembered some of the fonder memories I had of school. She didn't seem to notice me standing there when I first walked in, but I tapped her on the shoulder to say hello, and her jaw dropped almost straight to the floor. We hugged each other, each glad to again see a familiar face. "Wow, you've lost weight," were the first words out of her mouth. While I knew I'd dropped a couple pounds over the summer from all the hard work I put in drywalling, I hadn't really been focusing on it so much, and I hadn't really expected it to be enough to even notice in the first place. However, the scale would tell me later that night that in the course of just over three months, I'd dropped almost 80 pounds (that's 36 kilograms for you metric people). Losing weight started to show me a whole new world that I'd missed out on. Instead of being the slowest person to be running the track, I was now one of the fastest. Instead of being laughed at, people started to look up to me, and instead of being ignored, people really started to listen to me. All these little differences started to add up very quickly and I gained a new kind of confidence in myself that I never knew I could have. Unfortunately, it wasn't just me that had changed. The drafting class I'd grown to love had changed drastically. Mr. Miller had left our school to teach at another, and the new instructor was a lot more lax about teaching. He seemed more intent on telling us about how proud he was to be a bad landlord than he was on actually teaching us new drafting techniques. Only four of us were left from the last class, and we sat at the back of the room with challenging projects to do, but with very little direction to help us complete them. His goal, he said, was to have us figure things out on our own so that we could figure out how to make sense out of things we didn't quite understand without any help. The four of us that had Miller before were able to do this pretty well, as we were used to working in teams by this point, but the majority of the rest of the class was just starting drafting and had never been properly introduced to even the basic concepts of CAD or drafting. Our new instructor didn't believe in teamwork the same way Miller had, and the class lost all the momentum it used to have. Melissa started to break down as the year wore on, and on a particularly frustrating day a bomb seemed to go off in her head and she ripped her drawing up from her table and threw it in the trash bin as she ran out of class. With this new teaching style to get used to, I wasn't doing so well myself, and I really felt he frustration with the situation. But, somehow I knew that if we worked at this with each other, we could make it through the year, no matter how hard things were. When the bell rang for the end of the period I pulled her drawing from the waste basket she'd thrown it in and I put it in my locker for safe keeping. Later on that night, I pulled her drawing out of my bag and lay it down flat on a table I had in my basement, piling several books on top of it to smooth out some of the creases and wrinkles. I wrote her a note saying that she'd helped me out by being there for me after my hard times, and I thought back to when she'd helped me after 'Nerd,' and I told her the same thing she had told me once, that everything would be all right, so long as she gave it time. My heart told me she could do anything if she put her mind to it, and time showed me I was right. The next morning I handed her back her drawing and she started to cry after she read the note. Even though the original was pretty much ruined from its experience with the trashcan, she was able to start another copy of the drawing, and finished the project by the end of the semester. Later, that same drawing won her first place in the state competition and even qualified her to go to nationals. Meeting For The First Time Meanwhile, Stephanie and I were becoming closer and closer to each other in our online romance, and we eventually got up the nerve to go to a concert together. It was the first time I'd ever really had a date. I remember walking in the arena and being faced with groups of speakers the size of small cars that hung above the stage to the front. It wasn't long before the lights were dim and the crowd was packed, with us standing right on the floor, not far from the stage. As anyone who has been to an indoor concert can tell you, it's loud, louder than you can possibly imagine until you've actually heard it. And even though I'd heard this from other people before, I didn't fully comprehend it until the band struck its first chord. Everything around me seemed to vibrate intensely, and I could feel the music rattling through my bones. In the truest sense of the word, it was an 'awesome' experience to feel, and right there in the middle of it all, we shared together a kiss that would last a lifetime worth of memories. Before the final act came on stage Stephanie and I ducked out to avoid the crowd of people that would soon be flooding into the parking lot. We drove down town to an all night restaurant and got a table so we could have some time to really start talking. What I remember most about the night, and what I'll always cherish in a small part of my heart was the look of her smile as we gazed at each other's eyes, happy to at last meet in person. Trouble Brewing Back at school my new confidence in myself was starting to get me into trouble. People who'd known me for a while knew that I was good with computers, and if a conversation suddenly drifted the right way while I was there, I would talk up a storm about all the things I could do with them, and since that didn't seem to always be enough to keep people's interest, I started to make up stories about the things I couldn't really do, just to boost my ego a bit. Before long I was known in quite a few circles as the school's computer hacking expert, and if you had asked me about it then, I wouldn't have let you think any lesser of me. However, talk and gossip like this can only get you so far before it gets you into trouble, and it can even make you lose some friends if you're not careful. There was a group of computer elitists at the high school that were secretly tweaking and plotting at a way to break into the computer network and wreak chaos on all the computers at school. One of them had worked for the school over the summer to help put the network together, since the one network technician they had hired wasn't able to handle the job on his own in such a short time span. This key figure managed to smuggle the password for the security program the school used down to this group of want-to-be hackers who then used it to make the computer technician's life a living nightmare. It wasn't very long until the password made its way to me, but even though I was more than able to talk the talk, when push came to shove, I didn't have the balls to do any real damage to the system. I just sat back and watched the whole thing unfold. Computers started to magically become less restricted than they used to be, but to the common passer by, nothing seemed to be any different about them. Then the real trouble began. Screens became littered with nasty messages and various backgrounds that were most definitely not put there by the staff. The computer tech knew that there had to be a security breach, but no one was really sure just how bad it was, or how much things had spread. So, in an effort to try to figure out just where the situation stood, they started to bring students in that were sitting at computers that had been messed with. Those students were then asked to name the names of the people they knew were responsible and the people who they thought might be behind the whole scheme. Through this witch trial type process of naming names, my name came into the mix quite a few times, and it began to look more and more like I was the Al Capone of the computer hackers. They took away my computer access for a few weeks while they tried to straighten out the mess and figure out what the reality was. Their first plan of action was calling me into the office for my side of the story. I panicked. In the back of my mind I knew that I hadn't done anything that was worthy of suspension or expulsion, but at the same time I realized just how many things I had said was able to do, and it dawned on me that when people believe you can do something, you've basically already done it from their point of view. That's the harm in gossip... it can become reality, without ever having been real. Over and over again I was called into the office, and over and over again I would go over my side of the story. All the usual interrogators would be there whenever I arrived - a principal, a dean or two, an assistant principal, a network technician, and, of course, a police officer just for good measure. All of which seemed more than eager for me to enter the room so they could poke and prod at me with their questions until they could find a truth that would satisfy them. With questions coming at you from so many directions, you start to stumble over your own words, and mix up events, even when you're telling the truth. At first I was so desperate to get out of the room that I started to give every part of the truth I could, but the questions seemed to become harsher and more demeaning the more honest I was. It all started to seem like a trap to get me to slip up so I could take the blame for the whole thing, so I started to be a lot more careful with how I was answering things. While I stayed honest for the most part, I only gave them the specifics of what they asked and I stopped giving them anything more than they could pry out of me directly. My parents stood behind me when I said I'd done nothing, but towards the end of it all I could tell that even they were beginning to have their doubts in me and my story due to all the circumstances. To be honest, I'm not sure I would have believed my own story if I were outside the situation. Shortly after all the interrogations and all the questioning there was talk of lawsuits from pretty much every corner of the table, and my father, being the kind of man who looked like he could make a bulldozer wince when he was mad, didn't help too much in making the situation calmer. A nervous shake started to come over my body when I got home from school, and when I walked into my after school job at a local delivery pizza place, my friends there all heard about the hell I was living through. What was the worst part of it all was its effect on my friends, most specifically Melissa. She hadn't done a single thing wrong, and she'd never been the type to lie for the sake of her ego, but they called her in for questioning along with everyone else involved, and treated her like she was a suspect. The administration seemed to want to get closer to me through one of the few real friends I had, and they broke her down to telling them everything and anything she knew about me. Now, when I say 'everything she knew about me,' I Read More... Voices In My Head Posted By: Atnevon - January.2.2008, 10:06PM - Comments (0) Dream All the world melted away, and he wondered if there would be anything left of himself when he awoke from the dream. Childhood Until the age of four, I lived alone with my mother, in what can only be described as a converted garage. There was no T.V., no stereo, and only a shower for bathing, but I was content despite all this, because I'd known nothing else, and because nothing else really mattered at this point in my life, besides having someone to raise me. My mother would work long hours at a plastic factory, while I was watched over by a friend, spending my time pushing around toy trains, and playing with other random toys, as most children tend to. It wasn't until I encountered the rest of the world, that I started to become uncomfortable being who I was, unable to fit in with the world. Through the ridicules of the other children for the the things I didn't understand, it became that I sank into isolation, and prefered to be alone most of the time. The world seemed set out to drain away my life, and there was no point in trying to have fun along the way. All I could do was try to get by with the things I had, and avoid the chaos of letting emotions set in. All through my youth, I always looked down on life, considering it a kind of downward spiral that never turned up for the better. If I had something, I considered it lost already, and if there was nothing to be had, I considered all to be lost. The truth was a much different matter. I just had to be snapped out of the coma that was my life, and wake up. Water It began as a clear, sunny day. The light bombarded his eyes when he stepped off of the bus his church youth group had gotten to the river with. It would have been nice to have some sunglasses, but he didn't have enough money for the kind with prescription lenses in them. They skewed the paddles for the canoes on the ground to let the sixteen or so of them each scramble for one. Being one of the closest to the paddles, he got his first and got out of the way of everybody else before he got trampled. As he waited for them to begin boarding the canoes, Megan came close to him, as if from out of nowhere. For no reason at all, she stood there and talked with him until it was finally time to start the trip down the river. When he was in school, a couple months ago, girls only wanted to talk with him when they wanted to show off to their friends how cruel they could be to that weird little kid. He never felt any emotion about this type of thing. For the last eight or ten years of his life, there was no room for the 'feelings' like other people had, at least he didn't think so. "Why should emotion affect anything you do," he often had wondered. Emotion destroyed the perfection. Making sure that all the doors and windows in his house were locked, six or eight times a night, turning on the TV a certain way, and always living each new day exactly the same as the last; that made perfection, not these 'feelings' others talked of. Now it was time to start paddling down the river. He was a strong swimmer and relatively good at canoeing, so he stepped into the third of the seven boats. Before he knew it, the water had swept them far down the river. With Scott, his canoeing partner, they kept up a good pace and were doing quite well for time. Suddenly somebody in the boat ahead pointed out the rapids that were coming their way. There was nothing extremely frightening about them, except that a canoe had been placed as a barricade in front of a particlarly rocky area. Ahead, the two canoes made it across without incident, but Scott was new to this type of thing and steered them into the side of the barricade. As they were hitting the side of that other canoe, he shouted some obscenity. Scott could be seen falling out of the back behind him, just before he himself went flying through the air from the front. The water swallowed him whole. It never bothered to even chew. In that instant his life was forever changed. Bubbles swirled in the murky greenish brown predator all around him, and then disappeared. After about twenty seconds of fighting with the beast, light shined all around from an unknown source. He saw moments of his past frozen like pictures before him: a dream he had when he was two, his first friend, an image of his father from before he adopted him, moving into a new home, a computer, and finally a television set showing nothing but static. That was how his life looked up to this point, a TV tuned to a blank channel. Bits of grayish light came off it, but there was no real picture there. Then that image faded, and he was back in the water. There was no way to tell which direction was up. As he struggled against the undertow of death, the life vest came partially loose and wrapped tightly around his throat, choking him. After what seemed like an eternity from the point he was plunged into the river, his body came to the surface, gasping for air. But it wasn't the same person when it came up. I was born. All the emotions which I had thought were just illusions to people were a part of me now. It was time to do something with my life, to make it a real life. When I got back to the shore, Megan was there waiting for me. "Where are your glasses?" she asked. My hand felt my face, and I realized that I had lost them in the water, but for the first time in my life I was seeing things clearly' Finding Truth It wasn't until that day in the canoe, that I really realized why people did the things they did, or why things like happiness and joy got in the way of things so much. When all you think with is logic and reason, emotion seems so rediculous that you'd never think anyone crazy enough to follow it, but the second you really feel what it is, is the same second that you give up on logic completely. I knew, the instant I stepped out of the water in that river, that there was no turning back from what I'd found inside myself, and my eyes were never more wide open to the world than they were on that day. Something inside me had snapped. All the beauty of the world poured down upon me like a waterfall of truth. Yet, with all the light came the darkness too. I found myself feeling pain as well as joy when I looked back at things, and the anger in me started to build as my life moved on. The Fury Of The Flame A silent scream ripped through his head, crying out for mercy when he knew there would be none. Every single rock that hit his back as he ran cut straight into his heart, tearing it apart with the pain of ridicule and loneliness that he felt in the world. Months had passed by, and no one had made an effort to stop his pain. All the long nights he'd spent crying to himself, and praying for something to stop it all had done nothing but give him false hope. The track seemed longer and longer with every lap he ran, a circle of unending pain that would never be stopped. Then, something changed. There was a new wind in the air, and a spark of pure rage glared from his eyes. All the pain, and all the anguish, and all the ridicule suddenly reached a peak, and he couldn't take it anymore. What lashed out from inside of himself was stronger than he could ever hope to hold back, and in an instant, they all saw what they'd given birth to with their mocking. Before he could even think about it, his arm was flying in a hard swing at the face of another, landing a hit that shook through him like an earthquake. Fire burned in his eyes, and he struck again, this time with more fury than the last. All they could do was stare for a moment, astonished by the scene they never expected to happen. A small streak of blood was on his hand as he pulled it away, the fury in him gone, released through his fist. Then the world came crashing back down on him, and he was faced with fourteen others who were ready to seek vengence. As they held his arms back, the one he'd just thrust his anger upon landed punch after punch into his stomach, ripping away what little pride he had left in himself. All the pain that surged through his body tore through his last hopes for mercy to come upon him. It all seemed another lost cause until the next day. While it was obvious that together they could overpower him, no more rocks flew from the group of kids that had mocked him before. The fight he lost, he had somehow won in the end. Ripping Through The Anger I never forgot the fight that day. It was one of the highest and lowest points of my life, wrapped together as one. Never before had I really known what power felt like, or what it was to let yourself to go anger. There had never been enough reason in my mind to justify what I did that day, and yet I don't regret the act. You sit through life, taking in all the pain around you, and trying to keep it tucked away from the world, and it just builds inside you until there's no room left for more. And, when that instant hits, there's more fury in your eyes than in the brightest fire of the sun. With all the news today of kids snapping due to stress, and having no other motive than pure anger and repression, many have come to judge them as simply psychotic, but in a small sort of way, I can relate to their pains. They say there's not enough reason in anger alone to do the things they do, but they haven't been there themselves, or they just have forgotten what it feels like to be the dead center of ridicule. Is it justifiable to kill someone in an instant of pure rage? No. Is it something that I can understand? Yes. If I could have, I don't doubt that I would have killed that kid that day. I would have regretted it for the rest of my life, but at that moment the anger inside me let me care about nothing else except vengence. Youth Cry I hear myself screaming inside and I know that I hear the cries of millions. Every day I go to school wishing for it to be different. Wanting a place for hope, a place to learn, a place without hate, and a place where being different isn't so wrong. But instead I find myself trapped in a prison of conformity. They tell me how I should be just like everybody else, how I should play their sports, how I should join their clubs, and how I should give up everything I have to be like them. They all want me to conform to their rules, but they won't tell me why. They have no answers to the questions I ask. No one can tell me why I should put up with so much torment; they only tell me that I should. The bell rings and horror fills my heart. It's so hard to force myself into the halls, into the torment of loneliness. I hear their shouts from all around; I can feel their cold stares into what they don't understand; and I can taste their bitterness as they mock me and laugh at what's different from them, what they don't understand. Their hate is so much, and their reason so little. It's like a fire in their hearts, not caring what it consumes, just as long as it can keep burning. Today it consumed me, and I saw no sorrow in them, only the smile on their faces as they watched me burn. This fire burns in my school every day, and no one tries to stop it. We're all too afraid of being bitten by the flames of their wrath. We sit by and watch as the world burns, just so we can try to stay away from the blaze. Now it's time to stand up, and not just sit idly by. It's time to let our ideas run free in the world and not be scared of the ridicule of being different. Stand up and shout your cry now, the cry you've held in all your life, but never let out because you were too afraid. A Cry From Hellmouth After what history will call the Columbine massacre, there was an outcry over the world of people who had found themselves living in the shadows of anger that these kids had faced before they lost control. Like myself, they knew what had happened was wrong, but at the same time, they could understand the emotions behind it all that could mold someone into such rage. I wrote 'Youth Cry' in the wake of the incident, and found thousands of others out there who had gone through the pains I'd gone through, and many who had faced much worse than I can even begin to imagine. It wasn't about justifying murder, and it wasn't about seeking pity for those who had felt the same ridicules as the killers. What the outcry was about was trying to let the world understand what it had bread by allowing the mocking and maiming to go on without end. If we allow our children to learn the personal biases we've grown in ourselves over the years, it'll only lead to things getting worse and worse as the years pass. The only real way to get rid of all this anger is to stop kids from hating eachother, and picking on eachother so much, and the only way to do that is to not give them ideas about what they should make fun of. The more we allow it all to continue, the more we're turning our own children into ticking clocks, counting down to the moment they release their rage. Time Bomb A time bomb ticks An empty heart dies A rage seeps through Forgotten in his eyes. Screams rip through His fallen mind If only he knew What he hoped to find. In a silent moment The chaos broke out And among the screams His fear could not shout. The clock stops His rage peaks An instant flashes And violence speaks. A time bomb ticked An empty heart died A rage seeped through Forgotten to no eyes Ticking Away Towards Love While I spent most of my life ticking away, falling from love to hate, it all started to look up for me by the time I reached my junior year of high school. All the pent up anger I had inside me fell away when I fell in love. She was truly the most beautiful woman I'd ever encountered, and even though we never talk now, I'll never forget the way she smiled, or the way she laughed when she was happy. I finally stopped caring about all the wrongs that had been done to me in the course of my life, and started to care about what it felt like to really be happy along the way, as things passed you by. People talk about love like it's this thing that you encounter every day, and the sad truth of it is that it's not something you can just stumble upon by accident every time you walk the streets. Love is something that might someday fade away, but something that should be taken for all its worth when you have it. Don't ever take it for granted, and if you can help it, don't let it slip through your fingers. Silent Beauty Alone in the cold A beauty stood, Waiting there For a warm light To come to her. The gentle whisper Of her voice swept Across the silence And into my ear. Even in the pitch Black of a lonely night The light glimmered So brightly off her eyes. The sweetness of her perfume Caught me in the wind, Like the smell of a tulip Fresh in bloom. My calm heart pounded In my chest when I saw such wonder. Alone in the cold A beauty stood, Waiting there For a warm light To come to her. The Light Of The World We search and search all our lives for the truest beauty to stand before us, and we end up looking so hard for it that when it does come we don't even recognize it. Beauty lies beneath everyone and everything in this world, hiding in the shadows of our hearts. It almost screams out for us to see it, but we've all forgotten how to look. Caught up in our own worlds, we push it away, not wanting to accept its truth. It stands there in the shadows, overlooked and unwanted, waiting for someone out there to find it. The saddest part of it all is that we think we've lost it forever, when it's been lying there the whole time. In the midst of all the beauty of the world, we can find ourselves without hope. Peace His fingers trembled as he reached out for the rifle. A brilliant blaze of rage and sorrow swept through his mind, and he knew he had to end it all. All it would take was one pull, one sweet kiss to the barrel of the gun, and all the pain of his life would end, giving him the peace he so long had sought after. There would be no more lonely nights crying to himself for the pain he had. A click, a shot, and there would be no more. In death he could finally find the freedom he could never before possess. The gun was loaded, the barrel to his lips. With one last breath, he pulled the trigger, waiting for the darkness to follow. Nothing. With its age, the gun had jammed somehow. It never fired that final shot. It never ended his misery. He fell over, crying out in anguish, not having the strength of heart to try again. Alone To those of you who have spent your lives feeling alone, trapped in the cold of a storm that doesn't seem to end, please don't give up on it all. I took that path once, and all the people telling me that they'd been there too didn't help ease the pain. It only made me feel worse about the world when I knew it had hurt so many people. All I can say is that things will get better, no matter how bad they are. Your darkest moments in life come just before the sun rises up from the clouds and lets you see just how beautiful the world is under the light. Love will be lost, and life won't be fair sometimes, but there's always another love to be found, and always a good to match the bad. Just try to live through it all, and not let the pain sink in too deep. There's joy to be found out there if you're patient enough to keep looking for as long as it takes to find it. You'll find yourself from out of the shadows, and find out who you really are, as long as you wait long enough for the truth. Shadows A man stepped out of him with shadowy eyes and a dark soul. "This is me," he cried. "This is me." Read More... Copyright © 2007 Silent Shadows. All rights belong to the original owners of the content posted on this website. For detailed information see our Copyright Terms and Conditions. Website Design By: Sanctuary. Backend Code Development By: Atnevon.