I never could simply get over the amazement twilight was to me, enhanced only the more by the saccharine sweet and delicate sun-evading season of winter. How could I, when the soft and calming darkness surged to life with such bracing vitality night after night? How could I be expected to sleep, even with their pills and liquids they so often thrived to force upon me? How could anyone think to request I relinquish my hold upon this sight, this secret, my friend in the sky? This simple niche in time, my own fleeting glimpse of peace. Surely I deserved it?

Once I'd run through week after week, night after night of counting off to my sister to be sure that she should reach her dreamland of such allegedly great desire, when I'd destroyed myself in ways most could not perceive of a nine year old, could I not deserve it then? Then again, why should such a young child yet be plagued with guilt or fear? Why would it ever cross a person's mind that someone still under ten might be continuously haunted by actions of both their own and others? That the youth of the world might be tormented by it rather than held always an arms length away, naïve, innocent and obliviously content?

But surely I deserved this moment of peace? This glimpse of a world all to myself, so calming and empty--how could I resist it, be held from it? I needed these few precious nights--so close, so vulnerable to the world around me, so very easily encroached upon--to sustain whatever semblance of sanity I retained. Without these nights my life would be nothing, surely; a phantom of blurring colors and sound, vocal vibration indecipherable to even the most adept of professors. Nobody should be expected to live surrounded by the cackling, snarking comments of which I had been submerged, how could they? Or else, that's what my few dreams did say.

Then again, nine years is being deemed as old enough to know the difference between a dream and reality all the more these days...

It was nearing two in the morning now, and under any normal circumstances I would have been long discovered: my light flicked off, television disconnected, notebook confiscated and scorned to sleep. By who, of course, is indubitably the question.

Michelle would have been the obvious choice, what with being so entirely anal and nerve-wracked about getting to sleep--could that be normal for a ten year old? Although, I suppose our moving here just last year might have held a role in that. How could I complain though, when her begging for me to stay up with her, longer than her, was what had destroyed my sleeping patterns in the first place; had introduced me to my silent friend in the darkened sky.

Yes, the sibling I shared this shadowy and heartless room with would be such a brilliant choice, had she not been sleeping over her friends' house tonight, I mused as my eyes swiveled quickly over her undisturbed comforter and felt a smile touch to my lips; to finally be alone.

Who else would possibly notice me? Mandy, sleeping forever as if magicked in the next room over, or else Phil hidden behind a closed door and snoring across the hall?

Unless of course I was mistaken. After all, those snores could very well be creeping from the depths of the floor below me, the combined din of both my parents. What a joke, so incredibly facetious--without the garrulous mouth of my so very anxious sister the chances were nearly nonexistent of my being smote.

I was safe. Or, as safe as one could possibly be; safe from discovery by the sleep adulating creatures I was said by most to be related to, at the very least. Safe from the memories like flashes of broken filmstrips rushing before my eyes, however? Never. They were always there to be relived, hauntings on the softest of winter days.

I was still alone, at any rate, free and at the greatest height of peace I'd ever known to be open to me. As little as that meant, it was the world to me. The silent, dark, star scattered world.

My hair was wet on my back, curling and frizzing slowly as time slithered onward, a rat's nest in the making and intransigently laggard in drying, but the rest of the world seemed to obsess over it upon sight. The faint scent of lemon from the conditioner my mother had me using still tickled my nose on the occasions the foremost clusters of my hair should sweep down to my chin; I fought often to hold in the sneezes it induced, wincing at the sensation souring my nostrils and tearing up my eyes.

It was worth it, though. It was always worth it for these soft spells of twilight, and if I could not endure slighting a sneeze for it then I was truly weak.

I hung precariously on tenterhooks, wincing at even the smallest of the house's creaks and groanings from my resting place with my forehead fitted delicately between two of the vertical wooden bars framing my bed. I was posed perfectly for the dual purpose of both comfort and multi-tasking--as I should be, after several nights of practice and action beforehand. My head was angled to hold in the small dent I'd molded into the light wood, allowing for me to watch both my muted television and scour the dark grounds beyond my rooftop for amusement. From here I could curl into an upright fetal position under my covers, my cushiony bear with slightly matted fur and prominent rescue stitches under the left arm left to sit squished with reassurance to me between my legs and stomach.

All this while I cradled a dark green notebook in my arms, waiting with the patience and jubilance only the cloying, soundless dark could provide me with for inspiration to strike, for words to flow unbidden from my pen to my rash and choppy lines; to a poem.

I could not fathom to slide that pen so much as a millimeter across my freshest notebook page without first staring down every possible nook and cranny of my room, this is true. I had to first be certain that there were no spiders, no ladybugs, no moths, no centipedes, and no creepy-crawlies of the strangest and most unidentifiable sort to spy on me and steal my night away since my last check. I had to always listen most severely for the creaking of a mattress or hiss of a toilet as a warning that I should click off my light, but my friend of a pen stayed dear.

More often than not I would simply be writing, scribbling down word after word of happy nonsense and the most confusing of themes, the gibberish making perfect sense to me at the time. My eyes would close in whatever passion I hoped to portray as my hand continued to glide across the page, smudging wet ink from the cheap pen's print onto my hand and inhaling the brittly delicate and enveloping fragrance of frost on my window.

I did not care here that I was left-handed, because now there was no one to mock me for it, for being different. I did not mind to leave my hair loose from its elastic prison because there were no strangers to become impassioned with its rare red and springy curl, to crowd around me in a cluster far too tight to hope to egress. I did not whimper at the thought of another reunion with a friend from my old neighborhood in which she and Michelle might bring me to tears with taunts of my allegedly being adopted. I did not feel guilty for having sucked away life before mine even began, for killing what would have been a twin of mine. I was not stewed in frightful delusions of scenarios in which those I cared most about should die a most painful death, and I had no need to be haunted over my cousins trying to get me to do the brain-killing evils they did.

I was not free or happy but far from it. My ankle was still chained to the wall of day life and reality, but I was nearly weightless. Had it not been for that chain, I could have flown.

And it was in that mindless position, eyes closed and hand streaming savagely across the pale paper, that the sirens reached me. I'd only ever heard the real thing at a distance before, in actual action at any rate. Turning the sirens of a fire truck on yourself because a large portion of your family are employed there and said you won't get in trouble could hardly count. There was also that party at the old house, though, where everyone decided to have the town block off the street--except that I can't quite recall if the police were actually there. It was so very crowded and there were so many people I didn't know that I suppose I simply fled. I was frightened, how old could I have been, five, if that?

That one moment though, breathing in so deeply the smell of a night early in winter, as relaxed perhaps as my body could possibly be and for the first time that I could possibly recall in my life, I heard the ear-splitting, unnerving shriek of police sirens. I hadn't seen the lights, nor heard the incident that incontrovertibly brought the force to life, but I heard them, the sirens stopping not far, it seemed, from my house.

As far as I could detect, there were still no signs of life emitting from within my house other than the loud resounding snores of my parents below me as I uncurled to click off my light, slamming the base of it in my tensed hurry and fumbling with the teeter-totter like switch. For some reason I could not myself quite comprehend, I could not allow for these strangers to see my light; to know of my non-sleeping state. What did I have to lose upon discovery but for everything?

This was my time, my world, my space within this life; I could not lose it. I seemed safe enough, the house quiet enough. So easily I could remain undiscovered. Until, that is, the doorbell rang. I had been seen--if only a mere blur of a glimpse through the window--after all, it had only been a matter of time before those frightening outsiders snatched this away from me too. Who could trust them? The wretched doctors and policemen foreign to the world through my eyes, who could believe them? The--what had Papa called them? Surgeons--who take everyone away, I should have expected they would soon move beyond people.

After all, nine years should be old enough to anticipate the enemies’ moves, or that's what was becoming ever clear to me.

All the same, I slackened my fingers and watched as my pen slid defeated from my grasp before begrudgingly shoving my sheets back so that I could push the ankles of my socks down below my heels and yank them off crossly by the toes. Why ruin a perfectly good pair of thick socks by trotting down wooden floors in them?

After that, it was only all too easy to trek between my and Michelle's empty beds, happily devoid of the fear of waking her. The aged door creaked its own preference of a throaty tune upon being called upon to open for a walkway, but was drowned out too smoothly by Phil's ghastly snores and the occasional loud tear of an odorously fetid shockwave for me to worry. When I reached the foot of the stairway however, I heard the soft steps of another and ceased movement, choosing instead to listen.

What would happen if one of my parents were to open the door and be informed by a stranger of my horrible sleeping habits? It had always been bad enough to hear the simple nagging of my own family, but what of a stranger? I could place the sirens to most likely delineate a squad of police as opposed to firemen or ambulance, but I knew only of them that they would shove people into crude cells. Or else, that was how my uncle liked to put it after having been on the less appealing side of that exchange a fair amount of times. Had my disobedience to the name of sleep been so horrible as to qualify me for that? The thought caused me to involuntarily shiver sharper and more quickly than I would have liked and created an acidic turmoil in the deepest nooks of my stomach.

I heard no accusations against me however and soon found myself joined on the hallway's threshold by Mandy as a tired voice graced my ears, "If you move your cars we can get this piece of shit out of your driveway."

Wasn't I to be told on? Had I not violated some sort of silent law? And what was he talking about, "this piece of shit"? I was confused, what had happened? Was I not in trouble?

Mandy sent me a quizzical look, as if she expected I could understand more than her, but I could only stare up at her dumbfounded. I just didn't get it. It eventually clicked somewhere in my confounded mind to attempt peaking around the wall that stopped halfway down the staircase, only to have my untied curls swing forward and expose me almost immediately to my father.

I could definitely see the flashing lights through the open door from here, that change was certain as I smiled sheepishly at my dad. Before cowering from the bulky stranger in uniform I had not yet noticed, that is.

"Go to bed," was all he said, with a slow shake of his head, to which I gratefully leapt back up the stairs and away from the foreign presence. To bed, however, I did not head, treading instead behind Mandy to her room where the front facing windows provided a more proper view than my room could ever achieve.

I had to crawl onto her bed to be able to extend my view far enough, but when I'd accomplished as much I quickly wished I hadn't as a gasp staggered from my mouth, fogging my immediate portion of the window. They really had crashed my darkness, my calm.

The lights were everywhere, flooding my front yard and searching out the smallest inch of my precious night's defining characteristic, surrounding the normally shadowy tree at the brink of the curb. Surrounding the minivan that was twisted around my tree, wheels in the air.

My night was stolen, my sweet tree injured, but it was not these but me that felt the pain: I was never safe.

Three cheers for that no reader knows the inspiration behind this story. Or does that sound too incredibly childish?

It's been so very long since my last update that I felt I should upload this, even if it was for an English paper and originally meant for no ones eyes more than necessary. After all, it doesn't really matter if the reader doesn't know the purpose of the paper, or me, for that matter.

So yes, in simplest terms, this is my bargaining chip for laziness.