Adam Torres tilted his head upwards, his eyes meeting the stars. Tiny pinpricks of light in the infinite universe; they shone like small beacons of hope in a sea of blackness. It was a clear night, and he could see hundreds, maybe thousands of stars, stretching back and back and back…
It had always interested him how the light that he was seeing was sent from the star hundreds or thousands of years ago. Hell, for all he knew, that one star, smaller than most, that he fixed his sights on had blown up or whatever it was stars did a hundred years ago, and they wouldn't know for centuries more. They would still see a star long dead, and they wouldn't think twice about it. No one would miss the star; it was just one lonely little dot of light drowning in a sea of blackness, swimming with brighter, bigger dots that people noticed… that people cared about…
Adam shook his head as if the simple action would clear his mind and turned his eyes back to the grass. They were stars, big burning spheres of hot gas, maybe with chunks of rock spinning around them, maybe with another star, a friend star, beside them… but they were just stars, and Adam himself was quite possibly hovering on the edge of insanity. The thought made him want to laugh, but he bit his lip to keep it back. Insanity. Well, at least it sounded fun.
Maybe he was insane; there was something wrong with his head anyways. How the fuck did it work out, anyways, having the body of a chick and the mind of a dude? He was a mistake, no matter how you looked at it. Tilt your head this way, squint your eyes, rotate your neck slightly, and he was still a freak. He still didn't belong in this world.
Either that, or he was crazy, in which case he was still a freak. And that was how Adam saw himself; as a freak of nature. A mistake, a failure of in the eyes of the world.
"Fuck my life," he sighed, and the words sounded strange, let loose to the world like that. He'd thought them, so many times, but he'd never said them. He tried again, louder. "Fuck my life." Three simple words could sum up his entire existence; talk about insane.
Maybe he wasn't really Adam. Maybe he was Gracie; maybe he was a girl all along.
Maybe…
He stood up and walked back inside, his head spinning, and the sudden disgust he felt for himself took him by surprise. He honest-to-God hated himself. He couldn't take being like this anymore; he wanted it all to end.
Adam walked into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet, eyeing the bottles of pills. Mechanically, he reached out and took the plain white bottle with the dull label that read ASPIRIN in red letters. He pressed down on the cap and then twisted, glaring when it didn't come off. Damn child-proof caps… so annoying. He tried again, and the cap popped off in his hand. The little, round pills inside looked so harmless, so innocent, and he felt almost as if they were staring back at him.
He took one and swallowed it, and then another and another. He kept swallowing the pills until every single one of the stars inside of him, every single one of those tiny pinpricks of light and hope, faded into nothing, and then it was too late to save him, even if someone cared enough to try to save their son who was their daughter, their brother who was their sister, the boy who was a girl.
Gracie Torres was dead.
And Adam Torres died with her.