Painted.

I'm always afraid that somehow, someday, someone might slam open the door and shatter my world into infinite crystal bits.

That's why I keep on looking behind me – I always have to watch. I'm always tense. Some nights I dream of nothing but long road trips across the country – those nights where I'm between the waking and the dreaming and I can't fall asleep because the moon is too bright and too clear and it's sung in the sky.

I don't know what to do with my life. But the moon is forever eternal.

So I fall asleep and then I wake and I see this orb hanging in a midnight blue sky – all alone – casting its reverberated light on the forest below (and me also), and I wonder: does it ever feel afraid that someday its world might shatter? That the Sun may no longer rise forcing it to drop like a stone into the darkness?

I take a furtive glance behind me. No, there's no one. Just the plain wooden door leading to this room I am in. But I can hear clanging and footsteps pacing up and down in the world outside the door.

I wonder when she'll decide to enter.

Sometimes I dream of long ribbons of green grass. It's a glen this time and the moon's still shining on my face as I lay on the ground, hands tucked beneath my head; a big oak, painted silver-blue by the moon's light, hangs over me but the moon still shines through. The grass smells sweet so I break off a chunk to chew.

The moon, I think, hovers like a white angel that I have never before discovered.

A knock. I don't want them to know I'm here. I don't answer. Maybe it'll go away.

I close my eyes and sigh; tilt my head back onto the back of the rolling chair. There's nothing but dark green (perhaps that shade was called emerald?) forest for miles that I can see. It's evening. Outside, the crickets are chirping. I can still hear pacing.

And now she's talking.

And I feel as if it is so deceptively sweet and I hate how he talks and I want to run. There, I said it. I'm afraid and I'm desperate and I don't know what to do – and oh God, oh God, oh God no.

I hear a more insistent knock.

And I wish it weren't so…and where I am in my mind is in the desert where there's nothing but midnight blue skies with stars that twinkle with you and that moon, that damn moon, that's always watching.

And I too fall like a stone.

There's no one around for miles so I can wiggle my toes into reddish-grey sand and run an infinite distance parallel to nothing.

This grey chair spins. Fascinating. I think of a spinning top. I had one once – pink plastic with orange swirls – but they cracked it into two because they said the top wasn't good enough for me. Now they think I'm not good enough for them.

Everything I do now is just lies, all lies. They tell me that this "I" equals nothing.

And (oh God) the door's being thrust wide open and I can't feel or breathe or think. So I slump back onto my spinning rolling chair and shut my eyes real tight.

And suddenly there appears a white bird watching that might just be me and I can smell sweet grass as I lie in bed running across the desert watching the silver moon –

I can breathe easy now.