This is inspired by a post I saw on Tumblr by Leopsa. Credit for the title goes to Emily Dickinson.

Much Madness is divinest Sense -

To a discerning Eye -

Much Sense - the starkest Madness -

'Tis the Majority

In this, as all, prevail -

Assent - and you are sane -

Demur - you're straightway dangerous -

And handled with a Chain –

-Emily Dickinson

If I have to be honest, YOLO was pretty much my motto in my previous life.

After all, I really thought we only lived once.

I was wrong.

I'd died pretty young—17, but not nearly an adult. Not even close.

It had been pretty stupid. Actually, I have no idea what I was thinking when I decided to rob Bob's convenience store.

Everyone knew that Bob was one of those overly aggressive, rash people. And he owned a gun.

But I tried to rob him anyway—YOLO, right?

And so I ended up on the floor with a bullet wound in my chest, bleeding out and laughing my ass off.

My life had been shit in my first life; as an orphan in a poor neighborhood, I didn't have many opportunities, and to put it lightly, I fell in with the wrong crowd. So having the neighborhood crazy (everyone knew Bob wasn't exactly right in the head) kill me was just fucking hilarious.

I knew my story—my life—would just be brushed away in the town's local newspaper as just another one of those kids who walked on the wrong path and ended up dead.

Just like how I was born as nothing, I died as nothing.

I was nothing, just another one of the billions of people living on the planet, and I welcomed my death with open arms.

Unfortunately, the afterlife I'd been longing for was just not to be.

I opened my eyes into a new life, and it was not fun.

They really should change the saying to "You Only Live Twice".

The weird thing is that I have no idea how I was born. One moment I was dying on the floor of that goddamn convenience store, and the next, I was inside a floating basket.

A fucking floating basket.

I have no idea how none of the neighbors outside didn't notice the flying basket, but I eventually landed on the doorstep of a random house and the doorbell rang by itself.

Was this the world of Harry Potter or something?

At this point, all I knew was that I was inside a baby's body—the shitty eyesight and tiny body made that pretty obvious—and I was at someone's doorstep.

Whatever happened, I just hoped that I would at least get some food before getting kicked out.

Seriously, who in their right mind would take in a random baby on their doorstep?

The door opened and I squinted to try and get a clearer image of the person standing in front of me. As the face leaned closer, I realized it was a man somewhere in his mid-twenties with nerdy looking glasses.

I still couldn't see very well but from what I could make out, he wasn't too bad looking. Okay, he was pretty handsome. But I didn't really care because I was mostly just praying that he wouldn't freak out and call the police or something.

Going through the orphanage and foster kid system was not something I wanted to do again.

But then again, it must be pretty weird to find a random baby in a basket at your door.

I just wanted some food. Or milk. Whatever could sustain me was fine; I wasn't picky.

The man bent down and picked up a letter that I hadn't noticed inside my basket.

(When had that gotten there? I really wanted to know what it said.)

After a few seconds, he picked up my basket and brought me inside. The interior of his house looked like something out of the movies—he had a freaking chandelier in front of the door.

From what I could see, there were fancy paintings hanging on the wall, with furniture that looked like it dated back to the 1800s. The walls were smooth wood and I was pretty sure one of the rooms we passed was a library worthy of the one from Beauty and the Beast.

Hot damn, this guy was filthy rich.

He placed my down on what I assumed to be his bed and sat down heavily on a nearby chair.

We stared at each other. It got boring after a while.

"What am I supposed to do with you?" He murmured, tousling his messy black hair.

Yeah, I don't know what to do with me either.

This whole situation was disconcerting, and I was mostly just trying to ignore the absurdity of it all. I'd never been in this kind of situation before, so I was just going to go with the flow.

Hopefully, things would turn out okay for me.

Though a second life wasn't exactly what I wanted, I didn't want to die again. Dying was painful. And it would be a waste not to try and live this life too—I'd died before I could even reach 18, and I kind of wanted another chance.

Hell, I hadn't even been legal. There were tons of things I hadn't been able to do. (Like drinking.)

I'd pretty much been living a miserable and fucked up life, but if this guy adopted me, I'd definitely be a lot better off this time around.

But seriously, starting over as a baby was going to be terrible.

Eventually, the guy stood up, took my basket, and went to the local grocery store and bought some formula. And a bunch of other supplies, including a guide on how to raise a baby.

(This was not going to turn out well for either of us.)

After settling back in the house, I finally got some nourishment—the milk tasted like crap; what the hell did they put in this stuff?—and finally satisfied, I became more and more exhausted before falling asleep.

The days were horribly monotonous and the man usually just placed me inside his study with him as he worked. It was a nice study, but not child-friendly.

I hadn't cried yet, but I guess the man knew nothing about babies because he didn't even notice anything was wrong. I wasn't exactly normal, but as the days passed, I found that the man wasn't exactly normal either.

His whole library was filled with physics books; a noticeable theme being quantum physics.

Joy. The dude who was presumably adopting me was obsessed with quantum physics.

I had no idea what quantum physics was, and I wasn't exactly up for learning it. The small glimpse I'd gotten at one of his books had deterred me from that. All I'd seen was a jumble of numbers and formulas and letters; and math definitely wasn't my strong point.

But he was always engrossed in his work and often forgot to feed me and change my diapers, so I settled on some kind of cat-like screech whenever I felt the need to use the restroom (more like shitting in my pants) or eat.

We developed a system where a long screech meant I was hungry and two short screeches meant I had to use the bathroom. Three screeches meant something miscellaneous.

I wasn't a very fussy baby—I only needed the essentials, and I spent most of my time sleeping.

When I wasn't sleeping, I just lay in the crib he'd bought for me and stared at the stupid plastic toys dangling above me and the padded bars of the crib.

(It was like a jail.)

I have no idea how many days passed like this, but I was already bored out of my mind and my body was too weak to move; my mouth unable to form words.

Of course, I was working on that, but there weren't any leaps of progress.

Since my crib was in the man's study, I was forced to watch him work every single day.

And he didn't do anything but work all day. Sometimes, he'd take a break for a meal or a nap, but he mostly just sat and worked.

With nothing to do, I was forced to contemplate my situation.

Considering the floating basket and magic doorbell, I was in some kind of weird world. Was it even real? I mean, what if this was actually the afterlife? Or some kind of weird dream; maybe I was in a coma in the real world.

If this was the afterlife, I wanted nothing to do with it. All this boredom was driving me up the walls and was probably my personal hell for all the things I'd done when I was alive.

I was officially freaked out. I had no mental or physical stimulation, and I was in some kind of fake world.

My crib was basically one of those white rooms that they threw people in to torture them.

And to make it worse, I couldn't even talk or crawl, let alone walk.

Throwing all of my energy into trying to walk and talk was tiring and I wasn't really a persevering kind of person, so I usually ended up taking a long break between every try.

My frustration and boredom kept building up inside of me until I felt like I wanted to explode.

I couldn't take it anymore. This was crazy. Everything was crazy. What was I even doing here? If this was hell, it was a damn good one, because I felt like ripping my nonexistent hair out.

Flailing my stubby and annoying baby arms, I started to scream, letting loose every doubt, every fear that had developed since I had landed into this insanity.

Startled, the man turned around to look at me. I'd never cried or screamed before, and his face turned paper white as he started to freak out like me.

Both of us were panicking and nothing was getting solved. I wailed loudly, sobbing at the top of my lungs while kicking out frantically.

I needed to get the fuck out of here.

The man paced on the floor, wringing his hands ineffectively. "Shit, what do I do?"

He stopped in front of my crib and gingerly picked me up, trying to avoid my violently moving limbs. I nailed him in the face and he grimaced as a I smirked inwardly.

That's what you get, asshole. Try leaving me alone for a few weeks again.

Placing me on his shoulder, he began to murmur some words in a comforting and gentle tone as he swayed from side to side.

The movement was oddly soothing and I eventually quieted down as I felt my hysterics fall to a manageable level. I was stuck in some crazy ass world that I couldn't understand, but really, there was nothing I could do right now. I'd have to make the best of it.

Even if it was all fake, I'd have to deal with it and live on. On the off chance that it was real, I would have to deal with this world anyway, so no matter what, I was stuck here.

As I sniffled softly and listened to what the man was actually saying, I realized that he was reciting some kind of mathematical formula.

Yup, this world was insane.

"It's all okay now." He told me, smiling sweetly. "See, there's nothing to cry about. I've got you."

Gross. This was like a cheesy single parent raises kid film and it was really, really gross. It felt pretty fake—this guy hardly knew me and I hardly knew him. Why in the world would I trust him?

I didn't respond and let him rock me, determined not to respond to anything he said at all. Babbling was for losers, anyway.

It was a while after my freak out that I noticed the feeling of strangeness that was constantly bubbling up in me.

I'd never noticed it before, but for some reason, I was able to feel something—

Something indescribably ethereal, lingering on the edges of my soul, like an underground spring of water waiting to be tapped.

And with this strange feeling came strange happenings.

Now, whenever I slept, I dreamed. These dreams weren't those vaguely familiar and fuzzy ones; they were unbelievably vivid and otherworldly.

Colors, shapes, images I'd never seen before melded into one and separated in my mind. Things I could have never imagined came to life and I was absolutely stunned.

My dreams were like another world—a crazy world within a crazy world—and I was more lost than ever.

(Inception had nothing on this.)

I could actually feel, smell, or taste the things in my dreams. It was like lucid dreaming, but a hundred times better.

And it wasn't long until I discovered that I could create things in my dreamscape.

I was missing my old neighborhood, and I longed for the familiar safety of the place I'd grown up in.

The moment I began to wish for it, it started to appear.

Buildings, dirty sidewalks, streets littered with junk and graffiti; they were all forming around me. I watched the simple brown building of the orphanage swirl into existence and it hurt. It hurt to see what I had lost, even though I had never loved it much anyway.

Now that I was gone, everything that I once had became something to long for; a sweet memory in the midst of the madness my life had become. (Even though they weren't very good memories.)

I leaned forward and trailed a finger down the side of the ugly yellow plastic slide of the local playground I'd always gone to as a kid.

It was as rundown as I remembered it to be.

As I neared the monkey bars, I noted with surprise that the bars were colored a faded grey, and they looked fuzzy, like they were trying not to flicker out of existence.

I couldn't remember what the playground actually looked like except for the slide; and with a shock, I realized that my memories of my past life had faded.

The mental image I'd had of it was reflected in the playground I conjured and on closer inspection of the small neighborhood I'd created, I realized that there weren't many fine details.

I couldn't create what I couldn't see.

Frowning, I created a tree to test it out. From a distance, it looked fine and perfectly normal, as I walked right in front of it, I realized that it had none of the ridges that the bark usually had. A leaf fluttered onto my head, and I retrieved it only to see that there were no veins. The leaf was just a leaf-shaped piece of green. The texture was like paper instead of the waxy cover leaves usually had in nature.

I groaned and sullenly kicked at the roots of the tree. It toppled over.

"Fuck." I snapped, plopping on the ground and sighing.

I couldn't even create something real. How pathetic.

I didn't care that this was just a dream—I was going to make a real tree, and nothing was going to stop me.

Thankfully, my body in my dreams was the body I'd had in my past life, so I was able to stand and move as I liked. I spent the rest of my dream trying to make a tree and failing miserably every time.

Every time I tried to conjure a tree, I could never get the image in my head just right. It was way too hard to imagine every little detail of the tree, and I ended up making a forest of deformed trees. It was really, really creepy looking.

From then on, I started to notice the things around me with a sharper eye; drinking in all the tiny details and trying to form the image in my head.

I had nothing else to do with my time anyway.

Creating things in my dreams was actually kind of fun, and it gave me something to do—and it was a challenge, so I wasn't going to back down until I made that goddamn tree.

(It was a lot more fun than trying to walk and talk anyway. Why push my infant body to do things that are impossible at its current developmental stage?)

I spent so much time in my dreams that they started to meld into "real" life. Or the world I lived in when I was awake.

The only thing that allowed me to have a distinction from my dreams and my conscious life was the fact that the normality of the place I lived in. My dreams were way too crazy to be real.

Thinking of my past life as my "real' life was getting too complicated (and frankly, so complex that I was starting to have identity issues) so I started referring to the world I lived in now as the "real" world.

And the real world that I lived in was becoming dream-like way too quickly. In fact, it shouldn't have been happening at all.

But every time I woke up, I began to see things from my dreams.

At first, I thought it was just my overactive imagination. But the randomly placed baseballs began to turn into pink elephants, and the pink elephants turned into crackling fires.

I could fucking feel the heat, and I wasn't going to touch it.

I'd only been thinking about how I'd like to go camping one day, and a fire appeared on the floor next to me.

Needless to say, I was terrified.

Am I still dreaming? That can't be possible—I clearly remember waking up. What the hell is going on?

There was a fire on the floor and things were not okay.

I tried to stay as quiet as possible so the man wouldn't notice and focused on putting it out.

I failed miserably and ended up conjuring a water bucket next to the fire instead.

That was useless—my arms were way too short to reach and the only thing I could do was stand.

At that moment, the man chose to turn around.

Why now, of all times? I groaned with despair and prayed for the best.

He let out a yelp and jumped up.

"What the fuck?"

He gaped stupidly for a few seconds and then grabbed the bucket next to the fire and put it out.

"What—" Pinching the bridge of his nose, his face contorted through a myriad of emotions before settling on confusion.

I peered at him through the bars of my crib and he turned to look at me.

"It was you, wasn't it?"

Wow, okay, the baby is obviously the guilty party here.

But he had a knowing glint in his eyes that screamed "I have a secret that you don't know".

He set down the bucket with a breath of amusement and picked me up from my crib.

"Let's go get something to eat, shall we?"

I had no idea why he thought a baby would be able to understand him, but I liked that he spoke to me somewhat like an adult.

(I did not need some people cooing random words to me.)

Shrugging, I settled into his arms and accepted his offer. I was always up for food.

It was when I was going through my baby mash that I realized that the fire hadn't left any scorch marks.

A/N: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Well, I started another SI/OC fic. (Even though I have other stories in progress, whoops.) But that Tumblr post is seriously amazing.

I won't reveal the godly parent yet, but I think it's pretty obvious?

(Also as a side note: the chapters for this story will be shorter than my other stories—it's kind of styled as a semi-flash fic but not really. Having shorter chapters helps me update faster too, so I'm trying out the whole 3k-4k average word count per chapter.)

I'm not good at writing first person so if the chapters are a little bland, sorry. I'm working on it.

Anyway, thank you for reading and feel free to leave whatever comments/constructive criticism you want!