When you exist in the in between, it's easy for reality to sift away through your fingers like water, though it's flow remains constant with each breath. I wonder about the solid people, the ones who never fall, the ones who flit and skim the surface of the pool with a busy kind of conviction, never pausing long enough to even notice the magnitude of what lies beneath them. It's funny, because you hear about the deep intelligent people, the ones who see the world with the cynical twist to their lower lip, and how they hate shallow people, people who exist entirely in the material world. Truthfully, I am hideously jealous of them both. A thousand miles away from the ground, my world is upside down. It's where the most beautiful things are the most disturbing, and the concepts that people believe to be most concrete, I can't even grasp long enough to feel the texture of. There aren't any lines, see, between me and anything else, not really. Sometimes I lie awake, terrified I'm going to slip out of the borders of this body, and that any essence I retain will just mix with the rest of the confusion, never retaining an identity. My heart feels far too much, in a flood, for some tiny flutter in time, but when faced with huge ordeals, it's so easy to be cold, to exist three thousand miles away where the air is clearer and the stars are easy to cling from- I'm with others, too, sometimes, the blink of an eye or the tone of a voice is so easy to read, so easy to interpret, to know what's real and what's affected, but it most ways, I can't even understand these people's everyday concerns and stresses. I suppose it's the emotions that ring true and are so painfully obvious to read. When I was eight years old, I held the hand of my grandmother as we walked through an art festival, but as we stopped at one stand, I saw a small glass orb, tiny rainbows reflecting off the facets in the glass- fascinated, I pressed my nose right up to the surface, and peered through. An older woman, with gray gold hair and the trails of age lining her skin, peered back at me, smiling-- her face growing long and distorted in the curve of the orb. She looked up, disappearing from view, to say quietly to my grandmother, "The girl's got eldritch eyes."

"Excuse me?" My grandmother would later recall this story with a fondness for crazy hippie women at art festivals.

"She's got faerie eyes." She smiled like it was a good thing. "You might want to watch out for this one, she sees things."

I smiled back at her. I thought it meant I was special.

It really meant I would get used to feeling alone.