I stopped and looked in the mirror. I could just barely recognize the character in my reflection.  Shaggy dark brown hair. Empty, soulless blue eyes. Tired black jeans. Old grey sweatshirt.

From the outside, I guess you could say I looked fairly normal. But this world that we all lived in; I was exhausted beyond belief with it. There was nothing that gave me more pain than Earth. A world that so many people have lived on, always changing the wrong things about it.
Is it living? Or is it just putting up with?
I wasn’t putting up with it anymore, and therefore needed to go elsewhere. You wouldn’t know where I am now.
I had a pretty basic, boring life. One could never expect what happened to me, to happen to me.
I was in Juneau. Isolation. I’ve tried to live. Tried to, really. But I’ve been done with it right from the start.
I didn’t like who I am. I felt like I should, but I didn’t really know who I was. I sort of saw things from behind mirrored glass.
That meant I could hardly tell what’s going on. All I saw was what’s happening in my world. A dull, flat little card with my name and address on it.

It was raining. Frigid, icy drops of hydrogen and oxygen landed on my hat and shoulders, sinking into my skin, and from what I could feel then, right into my bones. I was literally chilled to the bones. I shook with the physical pain of freezing.
I was looking down. The pale grey sidewalk was cloaked with cold water, making it appear darker as my dark shoes swished through the puddles. The plain greyness of the clouds covering the sun reflected my mood perfectly. The empty street was lonely and isolated, leaving me to be the only one there.
The tapping of my shoes on the ground became a beat for me to try to distract myself. Tip, tap, again and again until I would get back to my house. I found myself reminiscing in the memories of my older brother, who was gone, out of the dull, repetitive misery that I had to deal with every day.
His name was William Michael.  He was someone who I always looked up to, always wanted to see when I got home from school, making my home an actual home.
He often told me of what he saw in his head when he was sad, all these visions of angels and little girls with rainbows in their hair and aliens in different planets, like Saturn. He said they made him want to leave and go to this planet. I often thought about it at night in wonder, staying up far past midnight dreaming about it.
And just one day, as soon as he was here, he was gone.
I found him on the ground near the woods in the park we always went to together in his last days.
He was bloodied, and holding a small dagger. His eyes were opened and red as the blood on his white suit.
I felt myself go cold, and began to shake not with the cold, but with fear and sadness. I closed my eyes and opened them again.
By the time I had forgotten what warmth was, she appeared again.
A lone, young little girl, dressed in hot pink and fuzzy rainbows from head to toe. Her long black hair was tied back in a high, long ponytail, and a white smile so bright that it hurt my eyes was on her lips. I could see her just enough to notice she was holding up in her small hands bags of candy, rocking them back and forth. She was about twenty feet ahead of me.
I trembled vigorously. It took all my self control to force myself not to run to her and take the bags. To leave with her and never return to this horrid place, in an infinite state of bliss and sweetness outside this frigidity.
Her black eyes locked with mine. I wasn’t frightened. I wasn’t disturbed. I had simply ceased to exist.
She swung the bags back and forth in her manicured hand. I jumped. She seemed to get further away from where I was. Ironically, I was more tempted. But I had returned to Earth and pinched myself hard on my scarred wrist. I let out a yell and suddenly the rain and cold punched me in the back again. My eyes opened. The girl was gone.
“Hayden!” a voice said. “Hayden!”
I shook myself and looked down at my pale wrist rather than where the voice was coming from. It was bleeding on a tight white mark from where my nails pierced my skin. The cold water falling hard from the sky caused the blood to dribble all over. I pressed on it. It seemed colder than the rest of my skin.
Someone’s hand touched my frigid shoulder. “Hayden,” the voice said again.
“What?” I finally spoke. My husky voice cracked in the melancholy stillness of the atmosphere, I felt at returning to reality.
“Come on, you dumbass,” my sister said. “Quit standing in the rain or you’ll get f***ing sick and hallucinate even more.”
I only stared at her, forgetting how to speak. Forgetting who and where I was. She stared hard back at me, not showing any emotion as she grabbed my wrist roughly and tugged me back to home, my broken shoes dragging on the sidewalk as I struggled to keep up.

Two Hours Later

I sat in my room, on my bed, writing in my journal about what I experienced today. It happened again. I saw her again.
I had determined that every week I see her more and more. She seemed to appear every two days now.
I was blasting Violet Hill while pondering getting abducted by aliens and travelling to Saturn when my father’s fist banged on the door.
“HAYDEN!”
The aliens were showing up. My brother was with them, wearing what he last wore, matching with the aliens. They were dressed in icy white suits with combs in their pockets, splattered with blood across the sleeves and necks. Their eyes were leafy green, and smiled at me with straight black teeth, escorting me to their ship. My brother took my arm, leaving bloody handprints on my wrist. My mouth was pulled into a happy smile as I left with him. He gazed back at me, his sad blue eyes beginning to sparkle.
Cats began to show.
Fluffy black cats with emerald eyes, widening as I got closer. More and more came until there was a black sea on the floor of the ship as we lifted off.
My lips stretched into a bigger smile as we approached the gas giant. I thought about falling into the yellow and brown gas, imagining the ride down through the soft clouds, falling eternally until the day I died.
“HAY-DEN!”
I got shocked out of my daydream and stoically walked to the door. My father glared at me coldly, then sent a clean slap across my face.
“Get the hell out of here and do something else for a f***ing change, you damn dumbass!”
He slammed the door in my face while I fell to the ground again. I stared up at my ceiling and decided to think a while.
Why was it so cold here? Simple. It was because of the Arctic Circle and our distance from the sun this season.
No, I had meant my house.
Well, there’s certainly a lot of downers here.
Dark energy tends to do that. The room temperature goes down when there’s empty free-floating souls around, not humans. That was the answer to my question.
I then took a nap on the hardwood floor, thinking of my brother and what he would do to me if he saw me like this. It would be nothing like my father would. Nothing like what our father did to us. I thought about the final things my brother had said to me. He was always reassuring me about how we’ll escape someday, about that just because we aren’t happy now and are in danger now doesn’t mean we won’t ever be.
“We shall be safe,” he said to me. “We shall be safe.” I felt his hand touch my face and hair.
The icy tears then fell from my empty eyes until sleep finally took me away.

Three Hours Later

I woke up, my hair mussed. My hat must have fallen off when my dad hit me. I pulled myself up and stumbled to the mirror. There were clear red handprints across my cheekbones, along with a bit of blood. When my thin fingers touched it, it stung. I stared harder at my reflection. I looked close at my eyes. Both were foggy and empty and hot pink as hell. As I approached even closer to the mirror, I thought I saw my brother gazing at me in my blue irises. My reflection flickered, and switched back in forth between my brother and me, smoke floating around both of us. My brother seemed upset. I seemed pained.
I flinched. “What the f***,” I said aloud. I heard my brother’s voice echo in my head. Then I shrugged.
I pivoted around and looked at the old clock next to my unmade bed. It was around midnight. Everyone was likely asleep, except for my sister possibly. She never cared what I did anyway. All she cared about is that I’m not gone.
I tugged off my shirt and pants and walked into the bathroom to take a shower.
“My head hurts,” I muttered to myself as I slid the curtain. The hot water and steam came pouring down on my pale shoulders, then to my wounds. I again flinched at the excruciating pain that flashed around the different parts of my body, heaving at the shock I felt from it. I tilted my head back to the water, feeling it pour down on my hair and cheekbones and pink and blue eyes. I tasted the salty water from my tears combined with the hot water. My eyes were opened wide against the water, seeing everything in this world and whatever else was there.
It took what was left of my self control not to scream bloody murder. When I rotated the faucet and the water turned off, I saw heavenly angels cloak me with warm blankets and healing all my physical and emotional wounds, tenderly caring for the properly. I felt them bandage my head and face, my wrist and chest and ribs. When they were gone, I took off the blankets and sank to the floor, bawling my eyes out like a newborn child.
I wailed and hit my head against the floor, shaking off the bandage that had just been placed there. After ten minutes, I told myself, “Hayden, get the hell up and SLEEP.” I sulkily glared at the knife near me, stained with blood.
I clothed myself and gazed into the mirror again. I saw my messy brown hair, empty blue eyes, and the crimson marks under my eyes and along my cheekbones. I saw my pale, thin skin, and weak mind.
I spun around and said, “I am Christopher Hayden and I live somewhere else.”
~
I had devised a plan.
I strolled outside, into the cold air of an autumn night in Juneau. I had forgotten sleep. I wanted to recall what I had seen before. When my father hit me. When my sister shouted at me. When my brother left me. All those times in those long, past years. I didn’t care anymore. I wanted to experience what I had seen without seeing them, or seeing my brother leave me, for what I thought was forever.
I stared up into the stars, the Milky Way. The distance that I was at was incredible. So far away, we were. We never thought about that. No one ever realizes, in the past, present, and future how f***ing FAR we are from everything else. So isolated, the Earth. So, so isolated……
I wanted to be even farther away.
I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be with the aliens.
Those aliens that left Earth alone.
“I am with the stars,” I said aloud. “I AM WITH THE STARS!” I saw the stars. They were in my brain.
I envisioned those aliens. I saw the world they lived on. I saw how much better it was than frigid, lonely, distant Juneau. And I was going to join me. No one would stop me. They were happy there.
There was a lake in my backyard. A freshwater lake, no fish anymore.
I looked down at my black jeans, grey sweatshirt. I had made sure my brother’s hat was on my head. I saw the black and blue scars across my collarbone, knowing that they were going to remind me of what I last experienced here on Earth. I knew they wouldn’t leave me like my brother had.
I knew he was with those aliens. He had often talked of them and how much he loved them, how much he wanted to live with them. How much our father and sister had criticized and took them away from us, our own things, our own lives, our own minds.
I beamed for the fact that I was finally going to leave that all behind and go where I wanted to go. Like where Chris Martin sang about in Violet Hill.
I wanted that. I wanted the aliens, and I wanted my brother.
The little girl was certainly there, I saw it in her pitch-black shining eyes. The angels were there.
“Time to go,” I said.
The dock wasn’t much longer than this. I was at the edge, the toes of my vans were over the dock, hovering over the water.
“I want my candy,” I told the stars in the Milky Ways as my blue eyes shone upwards.
I jumped, not feeling anything but my angels and aliens and my brother helped push me downwards.
I felt no frigidity as I sunk to the bottom. My eyes were closed on the journey down. The soft sand was a pillow to me. It felt like the clouds of Saturn enveloping me in my visions. I trembled a few times as I felt the air of Earth leave my body and as the air and dreams of my somewhere else filled my lungs, just as I had wanted.
My body shook once more and I felt my old eyes close forever and my new ones opened. I saw silver stars come close to me singing, “Christopher Hayden, I love you!” The music got louder as I heard Chris’ voice sing about the stars and the loud piano ringing in my ears eternally.
The black-haired little girl saw me. She walked across the ocean floor, treading slowly as her dark eyes locked on me. Her white hands were holding something behind her. She came closer, and closer. When she finally was close enough to touch my arms, she reached behind her and held the bags of candy in her palms. I looked up at her eyes, the blood draining from my cheeks, leaving only scars of what I had seen here, in this world of mine. The black and blue marks were all over my body and all over my mind.
Then frigid darkness flew across my eyelids and the colorful vortex taking me to somewhere else shook me out of Earth forever, out of your mind forever, just like how I felt my brother did as he said “We shall be safe again.”