One

"are"

And even though all my dreams are nightmares, I'll cherish my slumber

No one has ever helped me - Chris Bacon

Emmie
Whenever Oberon, their mother was in charge, the whole house was re-iced with the austere tenseness of resentment. She was nothing like Landry. Landry was warm, like an unusually concentrated ray of sunlight.

One night you woke from the dead. For you, you were gone mere seconds, for the world you were gone almost a century. How will you navigate this new world.

Emmie lay in her futon dressed in nothing but an oil stained tennis shirt and boxers. She felt herself sink deeper into the dust covered suede and laughed at the fact that all of her siblings confessed that they hated her. The truth was she was nothing like them. She never pried into their backstories. She was a simplistic, one track minded girl.

Before she became a ghost. She thought many things. Words that rose yet never got acknowledged. She loved the waters even though they were explosive.

"I treasured you, yet you used my identities against me."

She said to the reflection in the glass cave. Her hair dangled over her forehead in wisps. The water ran over her skin as it melted into latex.

"I treasured you, yet you used my identities against me."

I know I disgust you but the cold hard truth is that you rely on me. I gave you life and I'll plan your life. I'll be your shadow. I might have lied to the world that my goal was to give you a better chance at contentment but when I realised that you surpassed me. I realised that I hate you and I hate the fact that you're loved.

She stared at Oberon, contemplating how someone who boasted about giving life and retaking it away identifies as a person. This wasn't the first time she had been bluntly honest. And homicidal. She was only six years old. Six years old.

"I prefer walking and singing, accepting whatever identity you force onto me."

She stared at the mirror, and her reflection and watched it.

"Sometimes I wish I was fall. Warm and sweet. I wish I was the sky on lucky days. Sort of moist, an orange and pink gradient that didn't really deserve to be a background. I prefer running from the fact that the trampoline I've been jumping on for most of my life, is a grave."

I cower at the thought of being alone, yet most days I cling onto whatever company I can. I love taking the train and staring at the floors, grey and sticky. Covered in coca cola. Everyday is a fight, a reason to live and another to stay away. Most days feel like my last, so to elongate them, I imagine you staring at my grave. Then I cry at the fact that I never really got to live.

Everytime I step off the train, and the mosaic of life collapsed, I opened my eye's and recounted the shards of glass. Today, the shards of glass could talk. Even though my palm was covered in my past.

The Greeks have 7 words for love. Eros, sexual love, Philia; deep friendship, storge, love between parent's and children, Ludus, playful love. Agape; love for everyone, Pragma; longstanding love and philautia love of self.

Emmie had only ever been adorned with only one kind of love, philautia. It was for this reason that she never really grasped the importance of interdependence. All of that was put to an abrupt end now that she lay sprawled on a sheepskin mat, thawing slowly next to a fire that burned incessantly.