Know what sucks? I don't happen to own Naruto...cuz there'd be lots more madness then usual and Sasuke and Naruto'd probably jump each other a lot... anyway, enjoy and don't eat me cuz I think that I'm much too bitter for everyone's taste!

Liters

There are times when life just gets too hard to handle and you have to find a medium to deal with all the crap that just happens to fall in your lap. When things you thought were most important lose their luster and gleaming quality, become nothing more than another piece of the pile that continues to build and build with neglect. When training and striving to become better, stronger, acknowledged just seems to fade off into the distance. After a while, everything doesn't seem as great and wonderful as it used to: foods lost its taste, sleep becomes impossible, and even the most casual of meetings and smiles just sort of sucks.

For some reason or another, unknown and most definitely bad, everything falls apart and you're left drowning in a sea that you let accumulate over the years in unshed tears. You can't glide over the water, frigid and threatening to rip you from the inside out, with a fake laugh and smile that starts to become dimmer as the days wear on.

There's no point in sailing across a trepid ocean when you know that you're just going to end up sinking to the bottom.

And then, you think, that it's kind of ironic that this body of water that you sought to cross starts to look like liquid charcoal. That, suddenly, its all coming back and starting to haunt you when you thought you'd laid it all to rest when you gave up that hope that maybe, just maybe, he would come back; you start to hate irony.

Your biggest fear used to be drowning in that ocean, which was once clear as day and belied the horrible things lurking in it, when right now you're starting to embrace the feeling of the water clogging up your lungs and squeezing your throat like Death's very own hands.

Of course, you realize, once you open your eyes there's no more black water and you're not really drowning in a pool of unshed tears. But the hands are still there, imprinted on your body in tell-tell bruises. And it's painful, because you know he came back but only briefly and to pull off something to become stronger—something you gave up on a while ago.

In the back of your mind someone pulls the drain on that ocean and lets out a few liters before replacing the only thing keeping the water there. That part of you, the hand that let a few ounces of water go, is the nearly-nonexistent self that seemed to disappear and give up hope; its telling you that he came back, but couldn't pull through and had to leave. But he came back.

End

Boo? I NEED A BETA-PERSON-WHATEVER! HEEELP MEH!

Oh, and flames will be used to light bunches of flowers on fire so R-E-V-I-E-W!