This is but a humble attempt to put in words what cannot be. The characters are not mine, they never will be, and they should not be. No profit is being made from this. A warning of disturbing stuff ahead.

"And I could dream a thousand dreams, a thousand stars of pain. Of things that never could be done, or will be done again."

In my dreams I hear the voices. One, barely more than a whisper, leaches my will until I'm not even certain I exist anymore, I have no energy left to even move. It speaks to me of my failures, my guilt, the darkness within me. How it would be so easy to just...stop being. Give in. The other one makes me want to tear my clothes off and leap and dance in the fields while the storm rages around me. To be the tallest thing for miles around and laugh at the sky. I'm not sure that, once I started laughing, I could ever stop. I'm not sure which one scares me more.

They both claim me as their own.

When I'm awake I try to carry on as if nothing is wrong. Everything is fine. Why shouldn't it be? Nobody notices the heavy bags under my eyes or how my clothes now hang loosely on me. Nobody notices because I have no-one. No-one to come home to, to trust with my thoughts and feelings, to hug and simply be there. No-one. I am alone.

As my co-workers joke and laugh, exchanging gossip and stories about what little Billy did, or Katie's first tooth, talking about their loved ones, sharing their lives, their hopes, their dreams, I am alone. As I push through the city streets full of people. I am alone. There is only one thing more lonely than being alone in a desolate place; being alone in a crowd.

Life has become an endless cycle of waking up, eating some kind of bland soggy breakfast cereal, working all day, coming home and choking down something straight from a can, before I crash onto my bed. I can't be bothered cooking or cleaning anymore. It's just not worth the effort. But I can't sleep. It eludes me. Precious sleep. Release from the mistakes I've made throughout the day that haunt me. They seem so little, but they worry at me like stinging flies.

It's not always like this. Sometimes it's worse. It just doesn't seem so at the time. The source of so many of the errors that keep me awake during the midnight hours and ride me during my unsettled sleep. Lack of caution that just creeps up. Silliness. Lack of restraint and inhibition. Release from the rules society, decorum, and most importantly, my mind, place on me. A frenzy of thought and action. When it happens energy pours through my veins in a joyful frenzy and my brain feels supercharged. I feel...inspired by genius, like I'm on the world's biggest high and I see latitude and longitudinal lines on the floor and nobody's ever seen them before or knows what they mean. Then I begin to draw...conclusions.

But in the end there's the hangover of guilt and frustration at myself. Because it's all just an illusion, you see. The lines aren't really there. For every high there's an even bigger low. I'm on the rollercoaster of life and there's only one way to get off, because it sure ain't stopping for me.

That's one thing I've learnt, you see. When you're young you think the universe revolves around you and you're the most important thing in it. Such an inflated feeling of self-importance. As if everything exists for the purpose of gratifying you. Oh, the presumption of youth! Then one day you wake up, and you realize something. The. Universe. Doesn't. Care. In the grand scheme of things you're unimportant. People aren't interested in you as much as you think they are. Everything doesn't just stop because you've stubbed your toe. Things will go on. Life will go on.

The truth hurts.

But I'm coping, right? Where there's life, there's hope.

Then why do I feel so hollow inside?

Where have my hopes for the future gone? My aspirations? My dreams? I long for the release tears bring, but they do not come. My soul has become a barren desert. No life remains.

But sometimes the monarch butterflies come, bringing with them the colours. They say that a single beat of the wings of a butterfly can cause hurricanes on the other side of the world. It doesn't take nearly that far. With the butterflies comes the storm.

I don't just hear the voices in my dreams anymore.

A voice cuts its way through the wind, the crackling arcs of the brainstorm, the frenzy of thought. "Would you like to be my friend? You can be a flying lemming." No, not cutting. Skipping. "You'll like it, unless maybe you don't."

"Lemmings don't fly," I try to deny the voice, even as a deeper part of me cries out to it.

"But maybe they want to."

I welcome the storm.

When I arrive home that night I drop my briefcase on the floor, not even bothering to look at it as it spills open, scattering papers across the floor, and head straight for the bathroom, covering my mouth with my hands. I vomit. Loudly, noisily and without much dignity.

I've lost my job, what little self-respect I might still have had left, as well as the respect of others.

We lie to ourselves. We lie to others. But we never --ever-- tell people what we really think about them. Lies are the oil that make the wheels of conversation run smoothly. We may call it diplomacy, we may call them white lies, we may even just tell part of the truth, leaving things unsaid. But they're lies all the same. They have no room for colour or justifications.

What happens when you strip the petty deceptions away from everyday life?

Today I found out.

Eventually I lift my head out of the basin and turn on the tap to wash away the mess from the basin and my hands. As I rinse and scrub at them the strawberry-sweet smell of the soap begins to hint through the pungent nausea of bile.

Finally I raise my eyes from the work of my hands, my gaze working its way up my reflection from clothing now flecked with brownish splash marks, up to a too-pointy chin, to lips still covered by a thin film of half-digested food and bile, to the slightly crooked nose, then further up...My eyes slowly meet those of my mirror-twin and a hook inside my heart seems to catch, snag, and viciously twist, as realization comes.

I no longer live.

I exist.

They aren't the eyes of a living person. Someone with hope. Someone with something to live for. Drawing back a fist, I smash myself...my reflection. Cracks spiderweb across the glass. The pain of the impact breaks the spell, cracked glass remaining in the frame for a moment, before my image slowly falls, smashing into a thousand razor-sharp pieces on the bathroom floor.

A shudder goes through me, I'm uncertain whether it is of laughter, oranguish. Seven years' bad luck, they say.

I ignore the mess and turn the taps on to run a bath, losing myself in the rhythm of splashing water. Finally it is full. Steam mists the windows as I disrobe and step into the bath. Wanting to be clean. Wanting to wash the guilt and hopelessness away.

The warm water welcomes me into its embrace as I lay back and relax, tension draining from my muscles. Slowly, I close my eyes breathe out a long sigh.

Blinking, I find that the wall of the bathroom has disappeared, replaced by a forest. It's now dark, but a flickering light winks through between the trees. Absently, I stand up, water pouring off me and begin to walk towards the light, as if I have no true will of my own. My nakedness doesn't bother me, nor does the silence of the forest.

I seem to glide through the trees, never having to move around them and somehow knowing that my feet are not touching the ground. Stopping at the edge of the clearing, I see three figures on the other side of a great fire, just as I knew there would be. I can not see more than general shapes through the flames, but have the impression of femaleness and unseen power.

"Ask."

I inquire, with no hesitation, as if my questions had been forordained long ago, "What was? What is? What will be?"

One of the shapes steps through the fire. I look at she who lives in the past, always looking backwards at what could have been, what might have been, what never should have been. I see the answers in her face, her grey eyes showing more than words ever could. They say that the eyes are the windows of the soul. Her's are mirrors, showing only mine. Regrets. Lost opportunities. Mistakes. Guilt. I find myself unable to look away, drowning in a sea of a thousand sorrows.

Finally she steps back into the light and another takes her place.

The youngest. She who lives in the Now, living in the moment between the ticks of a clock. Between heartbeats, worlds and paychecks. Fever-dreams of vibrant colours and impressions. I am not certain whether I met her gaze, or if I did, for how long. It could have been mere seconds or an eternity, all I knew was that to do so was to meet unrestrained insanity, fully expressed and friendly. Total freedom was not meant for the eyes of mortals.

Finally I look at the oldest. Crone. Grandmother. "Oh."

This time it is I who step backwards.

Falling...

I wake with a start, moonlight streaming through the window onto my face. The water has long turned cold. Now my body feels as numb as my mind. Good. Slowly lifting a long slender arm and letting it bonelessly flop over the side of the bath, my fingers slowly sift through the fragments of broken glass on the cold bathroom floor, searching. Finally they find a suitable shard and show it tome.

It glints in the moonlight, the silvery surface stained with dark blood from my shredded fingers, themselves sparkling in the light with embedded flecks of glass, casting shadows on my pale flesh.

Slowly, deliberately, I run the shard down first one wrist, then the other, skin peeling easily away before the jagged edge. Tendrils of red spiral away through the water, turning it pink.

Such a pretty, pretty colour.