A Self-Study Within A Broken Mind

I had not been back to the library in close to a month. Even before, I saw happiness and left them to it. I did not want to interrupt Kara’s happiness, nor that of Lila and Tarne. Yet I sat at the little device again, continuously broken by stresses of everyday life, living in a temporary location that I could not call a home, and working in a toxic environment. I needed a change, or a chance for something else. The strings that held my life together in the metal metropolis were tearing apart. I had to escape before I fell apart. I appeared within the library in silence, only looking up toward the golden arched ceiling. I did not look around or move for a while. The golden paintings of godlike figures shifted around to depict a miniature story. There was a woman clothed in a billowy golden dress running through a barren wood. On her heel, two lions pulled a cart with a mustached man holding a whip. She took refuge in a golden hut by a blue lake, in the small patch of forest green, whit...

My grandma always told me of the blue skies before the time of the storms. “The blue just went on and on,” she said. “Half of what you saw was blue all day, sometimes spotted with white with clouds. It felt endless, until it wasn’t.” “Why did the storms start?” “We took the world for granted,” Grandma said. “At least those who were in charge did.” “Just a few did this to everyone?” I asked. “Why?” “That was the way of the world before the storms,” she said. “People looked out for themselves, while the world was dying. Since lightning is dangerous for everyone, it brought us together again.” “I would have loved to see the sky, just like it was before,” I said, closing my eyes to imagine. Grandma leaned over to kiss me on my forehead. “Blue dreams, my angel,” she said. It made me smile. And so blue dreams found me that night. I stood at the peak of a mountain, high above the dark lightning clouds. The sky absorbed most of what I could see, feeling almost endless. I woke up with the start...

My dad is my hero. He goes all over the world, visiting places across oceans and over different continents. He meets so many people everywhere, makes friends, and brings me back toys from all over the world. I love my dad so much, but he is away a lot. Mom is a powerhouse, but she misses dad, too. We wait for him to return when he has a bit of time. Most of the time, he only sleeps and leaves before I wake up, but recently he brought me a present from a distant country, translated to English from a very strange language. The book’s name was “ The Shining Eves: Magical Flowers of Legend ”. I had never heard of Shining Eves, but they were said to be important, and the way seasons changed. The more I read, lost in the magical world of four flowers only depicted by the season they welcomed, it became clear that these flowers blossomed in secret. The few who have seen the flowers bloom got sick with four very different things. The person who saw the Weeping Silversea could not stop crying, ...