My sadness is pouring out of every blood vessel I own in this strange body that people claim is mine. The blackheads on my nose, the pimples on my chin, the scars on my wrist are not mine but they have stayed there for too long for me to not accept them.

I search for whom I think is me. Once I saw her in the big old library just beside the Chinatown, the only odd structure in the land of dragons and noodles that actually had classic books. She was there browsing through the Dickens and Austen, listening to Robert Frost reciting the poem “Miles Before I go to Sleep” on the broken stereo and I watched her smell the leather bound covers and smile at a rusted rose pressed inside one of them. As I watched her, I started to fall asleep until I was miles away in this stranded rooftop looking at the stars and trying to fathom why the sky looked so beautiful above my head while the one that I saw inside my eyes scared me to death.

I realized it was not the stars that I was looking at, but the scars inside my soul that were so deep that they were cracking up and oozing the pain out. How blind was I to think that my pain was glitter and I loved to see it shine.