This is ALICE, writing, how may I help you?

I wake up in empty mornings on empty beds. I know where you are and I know where to find you, but I wish you were here and that I do not have to. I wish you were beside me, while the dark sky covers the stars, and we travel to where imaginations run wild. I would do it again, what we did:

On the first night, you slept by my side. I turned away from you, and closed my eyes at the wall, but I kept your hand close. And somehow, before I knew it, I reached it, and held it, until sleep had overcome my fragile mind.

On the last night, you slept by my side, again. But this time I faced you, and I held you close. And I loved it. Very much. You watched me as I slept soundly. I will never forget.

Tonight, I will sleep again (on a different bed, in a different room), and tomorrow morning I will ceaselessly long for you. The other side is waiting, as I crave for your familiar scent to linger on my pillows. In my mind, a dream forms. You come home, to our home, and you will hold me. Every single night.

But for now, I wake up in empty mornings on empty beds.

Why,

oh why, must I torture myself? I feel so upset.

I am an ambitious little girl, with my head too much in the clouds. But today I think I need time - to sort my very cluttered mind. An escape from the trivialities of life, and into the peaceful clearing, where heavy footsteps are muffled by the grass, or the buzzing of the bee is louder than ever… into this place where I can properly hear my thoughts, and listen to the whispers of my silent, but untamed heart.

This world of ours is cruel. And I know it. I see it every single day I spend in it. I see it through the little beggar at the train station, through the pedicab drivers waiting for their first yield of the day, through the car that honks behind ours, through the piling garbage on the street, through the dark smog that hovers around the city.

And in it’s people, too. Their furrowing eyebrows, their hurried steps on the sidewalk, their twisted grimaces at the noon sun, and their frowns, their frowns on the poor little child knocking on their expensively tinted car window.

But I am a part of it, of this cruel, cruel world. What am I to do? How do I save myself?