I hide.

She fights.

I kill.

She revives.

She creates.

I destroy.

We love.

We hate.

I die

She survives.

When I was seven years old I cried myself asleep to the sound of my father chewing scrambled eggs in the living room which was right across from my bedroom.

Eleven years later I found myself coming home and writing long goodbye paragraphs to all of my friends because the sound of a random sophomore biting his fingernails in English class somehow managed to drive me past my breaking point, and I was more than ready to die.

I never understood it.

I'm not a very emotional person, in fact most people find me quite stoic. It's rather difficult to make me extremely happy, or sad or angry...

So why was it that the moment someone pulled out a piece of chewing gum, a friend could instantly become my worst nightmare?

Why was it that by fourth grade, I could no longer eat meals at the same time as my family, unless I sat in the kitchen blasting hour-long "battle music" compilations through my wired headphones.

It didn't make any sense.

There was always this scathing voice chanting the same "You're insane, you're insane, you're insane-" through my head over and over again.

Why was it that at nine years old I despised my parents for taking me out to eat at restaurants?

"How can you be so selfish?" "You spoilt brat." "What's wrong with you?"

I tried to explain it to my parents once. We were on "vacation" in Canada, but even vacations had been poisoned by my insanity. I asked them if they could please "Not chew so loudly" because it made me "Very upset", which was quite the understatement.

No. Not upset. It made my blood boil, my pulse elevate, tears would begin to form and all of a sudden it was as if some other entity, some demon, would take over my body and say or think the cruelest of things in order to make the torture go away. But words cannot fully encompass what I feel.

They laughed in the face of my request, and my father decided to chew on his donuts even louder to mock me. So, I locked myself in the hotel bathroom and silently cried on the cold, tiled floor while digging my fingers into my arm until they broke the skin.

I was twelve years old, and still, nothing made sense.

And then the Internet graced me with a label for my strain of madness.

Wiki calls it Misophonia a.k.a "The hatred of sound."

And although I had a name for my crazy, I didn't have a reason why. I've had therapists completely brush it off to the side when I tried to bring it up because this disease was so obscure and so new.

"Try to just ignore it." "Have you tried deep breathing?" "Think of something else"

They didn't understand, and neither did I.

I still don't understand.

"No one could ever love Annabelle Moore"

At least that what her sister, Lanelle, reminds her of daily.

Annie has long since stopped trying to prove her sister wrong.

Annie insults people; tears them down, manipulates them, uses them and then basks in the benefits of her cruelty towards others because it makes her feel powerful.

Annie likes power, but it's always ripped away from her.

She doesn't have any power when her sister hits her and screams at her on the nights that she gets bored.

She doesn't have any power when her mother forgets that she has more than one daughter.

She doesn't have any power when her father looks at her with such unrestrained disgust, it's almost as if he already knew that she was gay.

And it's not like Annie has any power over that either.

Or the fact that she's in love with Catherine Smith whose only impression of Annabelle is that of an unlovable tyrant.

No one could ever love Annabelle Moore, but that doesn't stop Annie from loving in her own little, frankly twisted, ways.

She shuts her mouth and bites her tongue when her sister beats her because she loves Lanelle.

She forgives her mother for forgetting about her existence because she loves her mom.

She makes sure to never be in the same room as her father for his sake because she loves her dad.

And she says the most meanest, vicious things to Catherine in order to hide her affections, because if Lanelle found out that anyone made even a minuscule attempt to show Annabelle any love, she'd crush them like she crushes Annie every single day.

But maybe somewhere...someday... someone will learn to love Annabelle Moore, and hopefully, it'll be herself.

If I could travel back in time

I'd try my best to make things right

I'd try to ease the pain away

And try to fix all my mistakes

I'd dig our "friendship" up from dirt

And ease your pain, your tears, your hurt

And then I'd say "I love you too"

Instead of acting like a fool

I never meant to run away,

This time around, I'll surely stay

In losing you I lost my faith,

My will to live, my one soulmate

I regret not being by your side

I left you in the dust behind

But if I could travel back in time

I promise that I'd make you mine.

Lena was moments away from being burned alive.

Mia had actually done it.

She'd lit the match.

She’d thrown it into the puddle of gasoline leaking from the pipe, screaming arson, chanting about how much she wanted to watch this place burn.

How much she wanted to burn.

“We're going to die in here,” Lena whispered, struggling to keep her voice monotone as she continued to stare directly into the other girl's deep brown eyes. They weren't cold anymore-not like before. They were blazing, filled with an indescribable passion, and she felt herself being drawn closer and closer until they were almost touching.

Lena could feel her breath on her face.

“Probably,” Mia said.

And that was that.

Those were the last words they ever said to one another.

As they inched closer and closer together, it was as if their minds were melding, melting, into one.

Neither of their gazes ever wavered.

‘What if we were friends for the night?’ Lena had asked herself earlier.

‘What if I wasn't the school's reject and she wasn't the cruel, pretentious ice-queen that everyone made us out to be?’

'What if we were the same?'

She'd never thought someone like Mia Singh could even get angry because Mia was perfect.

She passed every test, went to every student council meeting and had the highest grades in their entire class.

Lena had thought she was soaring, but it turns out they were one and the same.

They'd been drowning.

And now, they were both burning.

Lena felt the flames catch onto her skirt, but she couldn't bring herself to care.

She didn't want to admit it to herself, but she wanted to burn too.

Somehow, Mia already knew that. Lena didn't need to tell her.

‘What if we could be more than friends for a night?’

Mia pressed their foreheads together and suddenly amidst the flames, Lena felt hot.

She was burning her from the inside out and Lena wanted her to.

She wanted her to, so badly.

She wanted her.

She wanted-

Suddenly the steel gray doors of the basement storage room burst open and in came a horde of men in uniforms shouting orders at one another and snatching them away from the flames.

Lena hacked smoke out of her lungs and shook all the of the soot from her hair, gulping up the fresh night air.

One of the firefighters immediately asked them if they were okay.

He told them that his department had gotten an alert that to their school's core temperature had risen to unprecedented amounts and that he and his squad had driven over as fast as they could.

He told them he was sorry the department hadn't gotten to us sooner and asked them how the fire started in the first place.

She let Mia do the talking.

She let the girl craft a wonderful tale about how the pipes had burst and how Lena's cigarettes had accidentally triggered the fire.

The chief gave Lena a look of disappointment but not surprise.

He'd taken one look at the gauges in her ears, her greasy, knotted hair and her scrawny bony figure, and decided he could trust Mia's story because apparently pretty girls with glasses can’t lie. He kept asking Mia more questions and then asked another firefighter to call their parents.

Lena's mother didn't pick up until the 5th call.

She asked the firefighter to drive her daughter home because she was sleeping and they’d all just interrupted her.

God forbid anyone interrupts her beauty rest.

Mia's parents came mere moments after getting the call.

They looked livid. Her father questioned every single firefighter in sight while her mother criticized the school, calling it a place unfit and wildly dangerous for the likes of her daughter.

That made Lena smile a bit.

If only she knew how dangerous Mia truly was.

Her mother gave Lena a fleeting glance, looking at her as if she were some stain on the bottom of her shoe.

She was used to it.

Before being hauled off into her parents' car Mia gave Lena one last look.

Her eyes were cold again, just like they had been before the fire.

‘What if we could-’

That didn’t matter.

They were strangers once more.

People who walk close behind me.

Now, I understand that is "Pet Peeve" of mine is quite...odd...to say the least.

And don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things I despise: open-mouthed chewing, clicking pens and the smell of bananas just to name a few.

But people, more specifically strangers, walking behind me is what really gets my blood boiling.

I'm always quite tense when someone is right behind me. I can feel the hairs on my neck stand up and suddenly I'm hyper-aware of every movement the other person is making until I'm so distracted by their presence, I crash into a wall or lose my balance on the stairs, both of which have happened just in this past week.

I've been hit in the back of my head more times than I can count. It's usually just with harmless items, like a ball gone astray or a friend's joking hand, but despite that, it still manages to put me on edge.

But I guess that's nothing in comparison to my pure, adultered rage when I'm walking behind someone slow.

There was once an angel afraid of falling

Who fell for a man afraid of flying.

The angel lost his wings, his grace, and his way

But he and the hunter learned to carry on anyway.

From the moment blue eyes met green

Neither could keep away.

The bond they formed was so profound,

That even God himself was amazed.

I was falling.

I was plummeting to my impending doom when all of a sudden I heard a voice call out to me.

“Not yet,” it whispered right into my ear, barely audible against the roaring winds intertwining with my screams.

And then everything stopped.

I was frozen in a sea of nothingness, suspended in mid-air. My arm remained stretched out, a desperate hand reaching out for salvation that would never come. Whether my eyes were glued wide open or snapped shut would forever remain a mystery to me.

Was I dead? Was I going to die?

I’d have much rather crashed into that rocky abyss than be trapped here in the vast Unknown.

“Not yet!” the same voice boomed, piercing through the silence and reverberating around me.

Was it God? Was I being spared for some divine task that only I could fulfill? Or was it the devil, and I was just trapped here, waiting to be used as his pawn?

There wasn’t much else I could do except wait until the voice-the God or the devil-was ready for me.

I waited for hours, maybe days, weeks, months, years...lifetimes.

I waited until all of my questions faded into the back of my mind and only then did I get the one answer I’d been looking for from the start.

It was like a spark burst into flames.

My life flashed before my eyes, and in an instant, I was back upon that dreaded cliff, moments before my fall. I’d returned face to face with my perpetrator. I was finally able to look into the eyes of my murderer and demand an answer, but as I met my brother’s tortured gaze, I knew I’d be falling once more...

Back into the Unknown.