There are some days where you just sit and wonder at the million thoughts inside your head. No emotion crosses your face as image after image plays before your eyes. The ear buds are stuck firmly into your ears: can you hear the music over the yelling, the whispering, the screaming, the murmuring, the laughter inside your head? You breathe so easily, but your nose twitches, giving you away, showing that you inhaled more than the dust rising from the classroom carpet. Lips, faded pink, are licked, as if trying to taste something that should have been there. Sometimes you shiver, even though the newspaper said it was going to reach ninety degrees today. And all this time you keep that placid expression on your heart-shaped face, not letting anyone in on the secret.

Some sympathize, others sneer and try to hurt, and there are always those who just shake their head and look away. You do not accept their sympathy, their cutting remarks, their neutrality. You cannot hear them, see them, acknowledge them. You are not part of their world.

I see the beauty in your silence, the gentleness in your distance. I hear the voices inside your head. I smell the worlds that you dream of. I can taste that tell-tale something that lies just beyond comprehension. I can feel your hot, your cold, your undecided. But I cannot get behind that placid expression on your heart. You are not of my world.

Those days that you live in this world, I wonder if you see me. I wonder if you acknowledge my understanding smiles, my attempts to reach out, my hope. Do you see that I just want to help? Just want to offer a listening ear? Do you see me?

Today I tried to talk to you, but I don’t think you heard me over the character’s roaring inside your head. I tried to make you see me, but you were too far gone. It was only when I brushed your shoulder ever so gently with my hand as I moved to leave that you came back down to this world, this awareness. You put your hand over mine, and looked up at my face. You smiled. You saw me.

“You ok?” I asked.

“Yeah, just thinking,” she replied.

“About what?” About this story and that, this universe and the next one, this character and the one waiting to be developed, this scene and the one waiting to come…

“You.”