Envision a dream in which you develop talents overnight. Suddenly you have the solution to everything. You understand things as nobody else does. You see a plant at a distance of fifty feet. By paying attention to the curvature of the leaves, you know it needs more water. You tell someone to water the plant. Then, you imagine studying the curvature of different species of plants to assess the curvature associated with the optimal hydration status. Why of course, the optimal hydration status will likely yield more food. Healthy food could then become cheaper if the concept is done on a large scale. So, a grand idea emerges from a minute detail. Is that mad? How can solutions to problems be mad? Or do we just let things be as they are? Is that mad? Amidst this dilemma, there is something beautiful. The very foundation of humanity shines: you care for something beyond yourself such as the plant and it's curvature. Some may say that is mad. If so, we need madness to exist for humanity’s sake.

She stayed in the shadows, where the streetlights didn’t quite meet. She checked the fastenings on her metal claws. Secure. Then palmed the metal whip in her other hand. He was crossing the street now. She wrapped the shadows further around her, creating a shield of darkness that melted into the night cityscape. He was foolish to meet her now, when she so clearly had the advantage. She felt nothing but calm- the fighting calm that settled within her, knowing she had planned every action of the night. Not a breath was out of place. Still, Cain advanced, unaware of Ciarra’s presence. He had agreed to meet her, thinking she agreed with him, thinking her darkness made her enough of an outcast to be shrouded from the light, figuratively as well. She had to smile to herself. How blind could he be?

Cain reached out with tendrils of apathy, cloaking the area in a mask of cold calculation, where warmth and happiness were sent to die. What a pair the two of them could be. Ciarra, with her control over the shadows. Him, with his control over emotions. He grinned at the thought of the power he had now managed to learn to control completely and utterly. He could make someone feel nothing, or he could overwhelm them with a something that overflowed to control their every impulse, turning their emotions up, or shutting them down completely. He felt one of his tendrils find someone to latch onto and suck their feelings from them. He felt a smug calm barrel down the tendril and into him, and then, it was his. His grin faded to a quirk. He came here to make an ally and he would do just that.

Ciarra felt nothing. The world around her was quiet. So Cain had found her and stolen the calm. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t anything. But this was to her advantage. With no feelings, only logic could guide her. She dropped the shadows and stepped under the streetlight.

They didn’t greet each other. Both knew the other had already been aware of the others presence. Instead, there was a stillness as they regarded each other, an icy stare from Ciarra, a sly smile from Cain. Each with a façade of control over the other, each completely confidant in their abilities.

Cain spoke first. “You came.”

She blinked. “Yes.”

“So you support me?”

“No.”

Contrary to logic, Cain’s smile spread. “It’s in your best interest, /Sunshine./“ He used the nickname she had been given. “Hers, as well.” He didn’t clarify who’s. She knew exactly who he meant.

“Is it, though?”

This was where Cain felt he had the upper hand. He had everything to offer. Only compassion could stand against his offer, and he was very good at fighting compassion. “You’ve been stuck in the shadows,” he observed, smiling at his own pun. “I can help you become someone. A revolutionary. We won’t kill them if we don’t have to. I swear it, if you join me. But they’ve been causing issues. Things that effect the general population.”

“And yet, I cannot currently force myself to care about either my friends or the general population. Not even myself. I have to care a little, Cain. Or there’s not much of a motivation, is there?”

She was right. He let just a little of her natural feelings deep back into her. He could feel the warm calm leave him and settle back into her. She could feel them, too. “And now?”

She hardened. “And now, I find killing you here and now the most appealing option.”

He held up a hand. “But you won’t.”

“Give me one reason.”

His chin inclined to a nearby streetlight.

The girl was 20, and strapped to a set of explosives. If she moved, they would trigger. If Cain pressed the button, they would trigger. Ciarra had no clue how he had managed to get Aria. She was a better fighter and at least ten times cleverer. A combination Cain should have had no chance against. And yet.

“You took too much away, Cain. I don’t care.” Ciarra burst into action.

The street burst into flames.

Note: this was a quick write that I did from a prompt, but I’ve been considering extending it. Any feedback/ advice would be greatly appreciated!

People don't know this about me, and they would argue against it

but I have had years of practice in hiding this thing about me

This flaw of mine, I became aware of it when I was in grade school

My social inept-ness...I was never like the kids in school

always by myself - weird as I had friends, one or two very close but that was it

I was a bit socially awkward. And here is the deepest part of this,

I take people for their word. I expect it as I hold myself to my word when I say it

so it has made me a bit wierd to be around. When someone says "let's do lunch"

I'm there with my calendar and ready to plan. I can't help it

I am sure I put people at ill ease when I start making plans when they were merely

just trying to be nice.

So this social in-eptness has made me question those around me

I no longer get upset when someone doesn't show after making plans

I no longer get upset when they don't call when they say they will

I just let it go as they are not like me...

When I call you friend, I mean it and you will be entitled to all that that means

When I say I love you, it will be from the flame that is burning so bright and so deep

that you will feel the warmth just standing next to me...

So, I have learned to mask this flaw of mine. So I can fit in, with those different from me

So I can socialize outside of the voices in my head.

With those, living and breathing...

Not like me...

People pass by me all the time. They judge me right away. I see it in their fleeing eyes as they walk past me, their path curving slightly to the side, away from me, so they avoid getting too close, thinking maybe I would grab their ankle and burp out a dirty joke about banging in a staircase or munching their pubic hair. They think I don’t notice that deviation, that half arc detour around me. Maybe they don’t even notice it themselves, their body performing an unconscious, self-preservation automatism. They think I’m a drunk and an idiot and a loser. That I probably smell like old sweat and cheap wine, some of it probably regurgitated on my lavish, torn “S’life is good” printed t-shirt and forming a nasty patch of reddish puke. Why is “s’life good” anyway? Why is that spelled out on a t-shirt? They must wonder that too, those who risk a glance at me. Well, I never knew. Sorry to disappoint. This t-shirt doesn’t make any fucking sense. That’s why I love it so much. The walkers are right about some things though. I am a drunk and a loser, and I spend my days sitting on my steps, chain-smoking Viceroy’s, a bottle of tequila never too far, ready to serve, hidden behind my always opened apartment door on Gordon Street, Verdun. But I’m not an idiot. And I know how to watch. I see these people as they would never imagine someone could. If they possessed the ability to sit behind my eyes, at the wheel, driving my brain around, making sense of what my strangely wired optic nerves perceive… they would either go insane or become desperate, hardcore addicts tearing their eyes out begging for more. Maybe that’s what happened to me a long time ago. Both these things. But my vision is my main perk now, it had to become a perk, so that I wouldn’t die too fast and could learn to appreciate it for what it is. My ride to both heaven and hell, paved with colorful schematics of people’s core, their drive, the essence of what it means to feel. More than that, what it LOOKS like to feel. Anybody’s turning point can become my fantasy, my drive. My design, in whatever way I shape it inside my head. They paint it for me as I watch them, some of their vapor I could blissfully die for.

Not one colorful body passed by me today. Shame. Really boring. I know they often look the same: gray and bland and uniform. Static and unwavering. Of course, they feel. I can see fluctuations and small color variations, a narrow range of shades, usually. Shapes form and shift around their shells, but the movements remain inherently slow. Passionless. And it is passion that feeds me. Still, I need to stand watch, so I don’t miss a gem, a rarity, a being bright enough to allow my brain to rejoice and feast for days on the nebulous torments of its entrails. I’ve only seen a handful of these treasures in my life, each one of them transforming me, turning my brain into an ecstatic, overflowing jar of pleasure and pain, a sweet torment if I'm poetic. It'll all worth it, so damn worth it, and the booze helps. It fuels my gift, allows it to reach out much farther. Amplifies the shapes and the colors and the waves, makes them burst out in pulsing spirals of vivid emotions, stronger than the deadliest white waters and just as dreadfully beautiful. I know, it sounds like one of a drunkard’s many excuses to get high, but just watch me not give a shit about what the empty passersby think of it.

This morning I caught a glimpse of an attractive shape. He/she was walking on Wellington, too far to my right, not engaging in my little street. I was disappointed, but it still got me hung up for a good couple of hours as I tried to relive what I saw, piecing together my own personal imagery of that person’s emotional landscape. Usually, I can make out genders, but this one was undefinable. Or rather, it was in transit. Changing. The color turquoise, filling up the body like a life bar in a video game, covering more than two-thirds of the shell. Appeasement. He/she recently acquired a certain sense of security regarding their own future. But it still showed fragility, hiding beneath a constantly renewing will, an indispensable strength without which his / her whole sense of self would crash against walls of glass, cutting everything inside until only shreds of tissues and bloody strips of skin remained. I saw impatience, too. A mind starving for self-completion. It looked like a wavering whirlwind spinning around itself, its solid core hard as a diamond encased in a shell of sticky water, flowing in languid concentric circles, steadily picking up speed. I was comforted by that vision. I think everything will be alright for that person, given just a bit more time. I cannot say that for everybody, unfortunately.

I remember Crimson and Gemini. Whatever happened to them I’m dying to find out. I haven’t seen her in three weeks. She was coming out of Gemini’s apartment with the one I named Steady, her boiling insides flaring around her core, her raging heart’s arteries branching out to the rest of her body like an overloaded highway of exposed nerves, stripped bare and raw, desperate to connect to just about anything that could stick. That’s why I named her Crimson. She’s always burning, consumed by her thoughts, her feelings, her rage and her love. Always red as blood, fighting for and against both pleasure and pain. Maybe she’s not that different from me. That’s what I thought the first time I saw her. Maybe she will become me, eventually, when her insides finally melt.

Three weeks ago, she looked like the painting of a car crash a second away from happening, sketched by a bipolar precog doing his best to illustrate what the wreck could look like when the metal would stop shrieking, when the fire would burn out, charred carcasses frozen in grotesque postures and devoid of flesh the only traces of life remaining. But the crash hadn’t happened yet. It may never happen. But for the very first time in my life this day, I saw patterns and shapes reach out of someone’s shell. Her turmoil extended outside of her body, fumy volutes of red and orange vapors bursting out and floating around her like a coating made of helicoidal twirling flames, dying and getting reborn fractions of seconds away from each other in a fascinating dance of passion and fear, their colors and shapes entwined together like chromosomes.

I figured out what it meant then. Her turning point was nearing. No, more than that. She was standing on the edge, and it was all but a small matter of time before she jumped and either break all the bones in her body or conjure a cage able to contain the inferno that licked her balance away piece by piece. Insanity and destruction, or a temporary comfort paved with the illusion of stability, the howling dark never too far, prone to creep out of any road she would walk… I only needed to watch her internal makeup for a second to figure that out. The repeating nature of her emotions. But temporary relief is still a relief, right? A cage she could build, yes, a cage an intense enough fire could melt away, again.

When she left with Steady, her vaporous flames still reaching out to Gemini like a thousand ghostly arms clinging to the edge of a lifeboat in a vein but hopeful leap for solace, I realized that she wasn’t the only captivating one of the group. I got too busy with her to notice Gemini’s colors and shapes. He quickly went back inside his apartment, but I could still see inside him as he leaned against his door, both his minds telling him to take opposite actions. The dichotomy in him was brutally visible, two people in the same head, the border between them bright and sharp as a triple coated sushi knife. No blurriness whatsoever and clear as day, I could see that. He was something entirely new. They both were. Now, two gems in the same day, I oughta have been dreaming, or gotten way too high on tequila to make out reality from fantasy. That’s what I thought to myself then. The intensity of them would knock me out for days, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t pass that up, so I kept on watching, boozing up like a sink so I could better see and sniff and suck in every detail, every color, every shape of emotion they oozed out for me.

Without surprise Gemini’s colors were antithetic. Light green to the left, the darkest shade of blue to the right. A creature of extremes if I ever saw one. At this very moment, his twin minds were screaming at each other. The dark blue one won’t let him feel his own self. The other wanted to feel too much. I saw both heads biting the other off in what could only be a perpetual cycle of mutual destruction, opposite forces pushing and pulling on the same rope, each side never letting go, never granting the other a break. Gemini’s heads were eating each other as he slouched down against his door, pushing out of him one after the other, screaming, biting, dangerously stretching the boundaries of his shell like distorted clay demons throwing themselves against the membrane of the underworld, wailing for freedom in anger and agony. He’s not looking back at the one he just let go of. He probably still feels Crimson’s vapor, but the conquering part of him only wants to make it disappear. The defeated one desperately aches to inhale it until it fills every cell in his body.

I remember he made me want to smash my bottle of tequila on my own head. And on his. But I couldn’t blame him for whatever he was unable to let himself express. At that moment, I knew he had no choice but to force both his selves to feel nothing at all, using the best tool man has created for himself. The same tool I use, for a different purpose. I also knew he couldn’t tear himself apart forever, and one way or another, one of his heads will have to take control, for better or for worse. Right there and then, I saw the latter as a more probable outcome. He wasn’t on the turning point yet, then, but he was walking closer and closer towards his edge. I hope I see him again. And her. Reminiscing has made me sleepy, and I need to get back in while the memories of the one I baptized Swirl are still fresh on my mind. If I do it right, these will feed me for days.

They both walked out of his apartment around 11pm. I was still lurking about, waiting impatiently to get a better view of them and find out whether or not their colors had changed since that time two months ago. I hadn’t seen them get in, and I was only gone for five minutes. The timing sucked alright this evening. And apparently, not just for me, if I relied on what I was seeing in front of me then. Gemini looked calmer, and Crimson’s dense layout showed patches of light yellow overlaying her usual redness. I saw it then. He’s on the turning point too. I see something building up inside of him. A future. Something beautiful, I think, solid, able to resist Crimson's destructive fires, contain them and why not, tame them. The timing is not right yet though. Not quite. Just a little longer.

I see people on their turning point is part of my skill. The best part. I see conflict riddling their body and mind, erratic current and waves of dissonance crashing against each other to annihilation. Over and over and over again. It always looks different, but it always feels the same: brutal, beautiful, intoxicating. It can be horribly deformed and painful. It can be as gorgeous as the sky. Different brushes, different paintings, all of them cherished and etched forever inside of my relentlessly hungry brain.

I wonder if Crimson and Gemini will ever show their insides to each other. Even I can’t see that. Still, their passion has quenched my thirst.