As usual; I was exhausted after yet another long day at work at an unimportant job in an unimportant place. I have a big social circle of friends and family. Christmas holidays were coming up. Had lots of traveling and festivity related preparations that had to be done by morning. Of course I had to do them all at the last minute because that’s what the cool kids do. Which meant I didn’t get home until very late. Day-old leftover pizza and soda honestly never tasted so good. Because that meant I could just fall into my bed and put an end to what had been a hellish day. Thankfully as the tired old cliché goes: I was out like…

One day you will wake up and find yourself walking on a dirt road at what appears to be midnight. The road is extremely long, and will look like it could take hours of travel to get to civilization. The road consists of only dirt, dust and pebbles. At first, you will wonder how you ventured to such a place. You will also wonder how and why it is so dark, yet somehow illuminated with light at the same time. You will quickly come to the conclusion that you’re dreaming. However, even with this conclusion, the scene before you will still not make sense. You could swear that you have never in your life seen a road even remotely similar…

You take the pills to keep them away. That’s what we were told when we were first brought down here–down through the sterile white halls with their flickering fluorescent lights, and our small, Spartan cells. Down into the nightmare. Why would we agree to this? I was tired of being homeless. I was tired of smelling like urine. I was tired of the looks that people gave me, like they knew I was there, but if they could just avoid eye contact maybe I wouldn’t talk to them, wouldn’t show up later, in their dreams, tugging at their consciences. I was tired of sleeping on cold concrete every night. I was tired of being so fucking hungry all the time.…

It started when I was six years old. I was in school, it was the middle of a reading lesson, and I needed to pee, badly. At that age, actually, a fair few kids still wet themselves, and I always got paranoid about embarrassing myself in public like that. I stuck my hand up and told Mrs. Zebby that I needed to use the bathroom. After the usual speech about how I “should have gone at break”, she gave me the key to the Disabled-Access toilet (as it was the closest one to my classroom). It was the middle of fifth period, and the corridors were empty and seemed cavernous to me: I was a short, scrawny thing back then.…

Let me start off by saying that Peter Terry was addicted to heroin. We were friends in college and continued to be after I graduated. Notice that I said “I”. He dropped out after 2 years of barely cutting it. After I moved out of the dorms and into a small apartment, I didn’t see Peter as much. We would talk online every now and them (AIM was king in pre-facebook years). There was a period where he wasn’t online for about five weeks straight. I wasn’t worried. He was a pretty notorious flake and drug addict, so I assumed he just stopped caring. But then one night I saw him come on. Before I could initiate a conversation, he…