STAY AWAKE.
I don't want to go to sleep.

How could I go to sleep, time is slipping and I need to live. I need to stay alive, I need to keep moving. I can't let the darkness catch me or I'll wake up tomorrow and the world would've left with the night. Everything in life is disappearing, fading like smoke. You need to live your life as strongly and emotionally as you can because nobody else will live it for you. In this world we need to keep feeling, even if its hatred and pain, suffering and sadness. Revel in the ache, feel everything. If we stop feeling we'll go numb, just like the rest of our inhuman society. STAY AWAKE.

Our world is evaporating and the ground I tread upon is becoming transparent. I'm restless but why shouldn't I be? What will happen after I'm dead? How many years may I have? When I'm dead where do I go? I won't remember and I won't be remembered. I'm breathless, I'm burning out. My life is ethereal, vanishing like the light of a dead star. I do not fear death but what comes after it. I crush my own dreams but keep wishing through the shattered pieces, I break my legs and the pernicious sting gives me strength when I walk. I'm cynical but I want to feel love at least once, just to understand it. Will I have time for it?

"Your mother told me you're having trouble sleeping."

How can you sit in that chair and tell me that there's something wrong with me? Who decided it was bad to be the way I am?

"It just my medication."

Are you blind like the rest of the world or do you just accept it that way? Can't you feel the earth spinning beneath you?

"You're not taking it then." She looked at me and grinned. I hated it more than anything in the world, sitting on this room and hearing a total stranger tell me who and what I am. I couldn't breathe.

"What?"

The air inside these walls is too thin. Why are the walls always white in these places?

"I prescribed you Lunesta to help you sleep, it treats insomnia and hopefully you'll-"

'Pardon? Insomnia? Did she say Lunesta?'

Ahh so that's what happened. My fear of oblivion had for a moment become my reality. I remember my head spinning two days ago, the ground beneath my feet was crumbling and it was the worst feeling of dying I had ever experienced. I felt like I was going blind and my body felt like it was drowning in poison, like my blood had betrayed me or that it might actually be the end of me. I fell asleep and didn't wake up till the next afternoon.

"Don't just alter my medication without my consent, you're my therapist not my friend. I don't give a fuck what the both of you think I am, but if I ever feel like that again you can bet I'm reporting you for drugging me without my knowledge."

I don't hate simplicity but the people who are weak enough to fall victim to it.

"Well you don't take them anyway, I'll need to think of something else. So you still take your antidepressants?"

No, I feel like my emotions are buried in clay. Besides that I'm not depressed. I just see how rotten our world is more clearly than most people. I can't feel anything, it's numbing and it steals the time I can't lose. "It makes me feel better so yeah." If I want to be like this you'll never change me. If I am what you say I am, then just keep looking at me with those eyes.

"Klaus, do you want to feel this way?"

Yes. I need this to stay alive.

"No."

"Then take the medication." Her accent was always too foreign to match but she spoke fluent English. Her voice was rusty and would tug at me whenever I stopped listening to her. She ripped a book out of her drawer writing me another prescription. She had short stark white hair and silver eyes, too young to be in the profession and too old to still have a Mickey Mouse watch. "And I mean all of it, I'm just prescribing you to a lighter medication so you'll stop hating me and this big bad world." The sarcasm was so thick on her tongue it made me want to give a quick slice to the main artery in her neck.

"I don't hate you." I just think you're an idiot.

I'll need to give it to my mother or she'll make me go to support groups. At that point people will start thinking that I'm crazy and I've been getting enough bullshit from Dr. Daenerys… Her last name wasn't Daenerys but it was something close to it that I couldn't spell properly. She didn't complain loving the character herself, and I didn't get pronunciation lessons from a snowflake.

She handed me the piece of paper and I headed for the door feeling worse than I did when I first entered.

"I mean it Klaus, you need to start trusting me. I know what I'm doing and I'm here to help you."

It wasn't necessary but when I opened the door and looked at all grayness in the people sitting in line, I felt a sudden need to quill my anger. "You want people to sit in an office as cramped and colorless as this one and tell you everything about their terrible past?"

"It depends on your perspective Klaus."

Jesus

"My perspective is that trust isn't something you are given just because you haven't wronged that person. Trust is gained by actions. Next time you want to talk to someone about their personal life, why don't you give them a tour on your shitty childhood first so you can sympathize with each other over your sadness. That'll save us from the madness we're living in right?"

She glanced at me once then denied my eyes. "Trusting someone at first glance is what makes us part of humanity. On earth we trust in each other as we trust in order and respect, without trust we cannot be happy."

I opened the door to the hall. "Your patients must really trust you then, look at their smiling faces." I knew I was pushing it, but I also knew she wasn't the type to be easily offended over others opinions and it was the only part I liked about her on the exception that she didn't always see things my way.

"Rome wasn't built in one day."

"But trust is built instantaneously right?"

It took me ten seconds to neatly fold the prescription into a paper jet and send it flying to her desk. I slipped from sight as fast as I could and headed for home.

There's an endless list of questions that fill my mind by the second. Why are we here? What is our purpose? Should I believe in evolution or creation? Am I ruled by time? When will I die? What am I supposed to fight for? Why do I question life? Should I be questioning life or is the form of matter already proof of an answer that existence is understood? And the question that is always is my eyes, every second of the fucking day. Why does it feel like I'm about to die?

The session took longer than usual thanks to the argument I regretted starting but the walk home chilled me back down. It was the beginning of winter and school was canceled for the because of the snow. The streets of Oakley were covered in fine layers of white and the cold air made me crave for home. In my town, every house is hidden beneath trees that tower over one another craving for sunlight. Unfortunately the smaller trees get trapped below without warmth and eventually die off. Sometimes the people cut them down because they're in the way and they start growing over one another casting a shadow on the neighborhood. For some super special reason our trees grow in twice the number and time that trees normally do because of some unknown chemical in the ground.

Oh yeah, sorry. My name is Klaus Roseveldt and I'm in my final year of high school. I have two younger brothers Romeo (17), Micah (13) and then a baby sister Kelsey, she's six and believe it or not… She was planned. We've all got muddy dark brown hair and light skin. None of us look like my mother but she got to pick our names so my parents called it even. Ridiculous. I'm slender, my eyes are forest green and I want to rip them from my head when I go to school and accidentally get into a conversation with an idiot. I have a lot of theories and perceptions on life but I'll try to keep some balance here.

Granted I've been told countless times that I'm too young to have a fear of dying, that I'm too young to want to question the world to the extent in which I do. That I should be getting grounded for sneaking out to go drink or messing with girls around midnight. Somewhere in between arguments with people or even total strangers the words apathetic, arrogant and asshole seems to come up a lot. But the word people favor for me the most is probably self-righteous. It pops up in most of their sentences especially when you prove them wrong Sometimes they'll even accidentally repeat it and if I'm lucky we'll get out of each other's faces before a fist flies.

In all honesty I'm not alone in the sense of being social at school. I'm actually surrounded by more friends than I can count and sadly also by girls with the brain capacity of a rock, but still. I'm surrounded by humans without their humanity. Of course I'm to blame as well, even though I didn't drench the inside of that one kid's locker with blue paint from art class yesterday, I found myself with a sense of hopelessness for our future and decided to watch from the sidelines as living people acted out a devolution of what we've been able to accomplish so far. The words 'We're all fucking doomed.' Lingered in my mind.

"Fucking retarded." It came out mumbled so I wouldn't need to be dragged into another insignificant conversation about 'nerds' being lowly and all that shit. Unluckily I didn't go unnoticed when two girls from my science class tugged at my shirt.
They were both in the top 3 students of our class and coincidentally sat on either side of me whenever we wrote exams. I didn't mind, I really hated their personas so I'd even lean back a bit for them to get a clear view. My reasoning? I'd love to see what kind of stripper they'll become after they do their entrance exam for varsity.

Ahh, I'm being a prick again, aren't I?

I stepped onto my front porch and could sense the inviting warmth of a fire burning inside.
It's still cold, should I rest tonight? Maybe a few hours. I hate sleeping, but unfortunately we can only push our bodies to a certain limit. That's how we were designed, right. I haven't done a lot of research on disorders, but I know when you have insomnia you're tired but you can't sleep. I'm not like that. I control my sleeping patterns. Something I mastered in middle school. I can stay awake for a week without feeling tired and I can flip that switch just as easily. Sleeping in class isn't optional so I'll silently sit with my eyes closed in therapy and switch off my mind until I hear my name.

"KLAUS!" a small broken voice called from the back yard.

"Ahhg what is it now?" I knew my sister only cried on two occasions. When Micah didn't want to play with her and when she got hurt. Anything else would be expressed with soft whining sounds. I stepped around the corner and saw Micah sprawled out in rose red snow. My sister kept trying to pull him into the house not understanding why he couldn't get up and all of the blood in my veins turned into cold lead. He was shivering and his forehead was bashed inwards. I suddenly understood what it felt like to be shocked to death. Instead of a loud pounding in my head. There was nothing, no pulse, no sound and no movement.

It had made a hole to the point that I could see the inside of his head and the top of his left eye was torn open so you could see the retina. Kelsey kept screaming but I didn't hear her until she hit me on my stomach. As sick as it may sound, It was not my brother lying in the snow. Micah doesn't look like that, I'm not going to touch him. That's a dead body, it's the flesh of a human being. What were my theories again? Death is inevitable and should be seen as such.

My sister's voice came through after a while. The body had stopped shaking and there was someone next to me. My sight blurred but I could see the person stagger to the ground. "Why can't I see anything."