Text.

In the darkest corners of the mind there exist beings and scenarios, events yet untold, that haunt those who venture there-things that are not worth knowing. Without being consciously aware of it, you find your breath is shallow, your heart is racing, your mind is coming to conclusions that don't fit.... Through the tortuous labyrinth of this experience comes a dim light that leads—nowhere. You're stranded, you can't breathe. Things seem to spin around you—the monsters come out to play—with whom? with what? “No, no, please!” They take everything you know, all the things you relied upon, all stolen. The light goes off, and the monsters no longer care to hide in the shadows.

Welcome.

Books.

House of the Scorpion (Nancy Farmer)
Sea of Trolls
Airborn (Kenneth Oppel)
Sky Breaker
Idle Wild (Nick Sagan)
Eden Born
Ever free
In the Garden of Iden (Kage Baker)
Mendoza in Hollywood
Multiple Wounds (Alan Rusell)
Artemis Fowl I-V (Eoin Colfer)
Half-Moon Investigations
The Wish List
The Artemis Fowl Files
The Supernaturalist
HP I-VI (J.K. Rowling)
Redwall (Brian Jacques)
How to Get Ideas (Jack Foster)
Storm Thief (Chris Wooding)
ASOUE I-XII (Lemony Snicket)
The Unauthorized Autobiography
The Lightning Thief (Rick Riordan)
The Sea of Monsters
The Truth about Forever (Sarah Dessing)
This Lullaby
A Different Slant of Light (Laura Whitcomb)
The Wind Singer (William Nicholson)
Slaves of the Mastery
Fire Song
Hoot (Carl Hiaasen)
Flipped (Wendelin Van Draanen)
Touching Spirit Bear (Ben Mikaelson)
The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
Monster (Sanyika Shakur)
The Young Man and the Sea (Rodman Philbrick)
The Boy Who Saved Baseball (John Ritter)
The Bartimaeus Trilogy (Jonathan Stroud)
Red Kayak (Patricia Cummings)
Becoming Naomi Leon (Pam Muñoz Ryan)
Esperanza Rising
Gregor the Overlander (Suzanne Collins)
The Tale of Desperaux (Kate diCamillo)
Sahara Special (Esme Codell)
Jackie's Wild Seattle (Will Hobbs)
Inkheart (Cornelia Funke)
Inkspell
Eragon (Christopher Paolini)
Eldest
Heir Apparent (Vivian Vande Velde)
The Book of Mordred
Magic is Murder
The Pact (Jodie Picoult)
My Sister's Keeper
Star of Kazan (Eva Ibbotson)

Ok. I give up.

--

I want to know
that someone cares.
more than anything.

Honesty. Honestly.

Can I be honest with you?
Oh I do love to be so honest with you.
Share my secrets.
My feelings.
My desires.
My everything.
Not that you care
but it's nice when I pretend you're listening,
when your uh-huhs are directed at my words,
when your sympathy is more than an automated response.

You know, I never told you how much you mean to me.
and how much I don't like it.
How much I don't want to care about you.
How jealous I am when you talk about others.
(I don't wanna know. Please don't tell me.)
Please don't hurt me.

It's pathetic really.
How could I give you all that power in such short time?
How could I be so dumb, so stupid, so foolish!
I have given you the one thing I always thought I'd keep for myself.
Me.
and I don't like it.
I don't...

But I want you to have Me.
Not because you deserve Me
or because you desire Me.
You don't.
I want you to have Me
Because I don't want Me anymore
I'm not blind to it.
You are my crutch,
my only way of coping.
I love you for that reason.

But you've taken it too far.
You took Me.
You still don't deserve Me.
...but you desire Me.
And...it makes me happy.
And I don't like that either.
I don't like how dependent I am on you.
You're not my brand of drugs.
You are my life...

Do you realize that?
Without you, I am nothing.
I am emptiness.
With you, I have meaning, a purpose:
To make you happy.

Sell you light in may cup.

She never liked the way it clung to her skin. No amount of rubbing or smoothing could make it go away. No amount of work could be put in to rid her skin of it. No nature, no chemical, no magic, no nothing. She tried to hide it, cover it up with countless things she'd layer in case she'd have to remove one layer. Exposure was unacceptable. The other girls...they never had to worry about it. Their skin was as perfect and flawless as any magazine cover. It made her self-conscious. She knew that it was pointless to worry about it; it couldn't be helped, couldn't be gotten rid of. She could only live with it.
She still hated it, still covered it up, still hid it. She couldn't go for a swim because she feared someone would look too closely. They'd look too closely and see. They'd see it. She couldn't live with that. Couldn't live with the fear that they'd judge her, that they'd think she was ugly or...or...defective.
The sad part is it didn't use to be there. She didn't have to worry about it before. But she grew up and things changed.
She grew up and everything was wonderful. She was pretty, but it wasn't enough for her. She wanted to be grown up, wanted to wear what the big girls wore. Wanted to dress like women.
She found them accidentally, those fascinating new sets of paints so different from the ones she knew. They made her feel beautiful. She was grown up now, when her face was painted. She was a woman. Her face consumed her interest. Soft eyebrows, hard eyeliner, eyeshadow, blush, concealer, lipstick...the works. It was all she could think about, all she could see.
Until she saw something else. Something that wasn't there before. She wasn't beautiful anymore. She couldn't be. Not with that...this...thing! She cried her paints off that day. How did she not notice before? How! Had anyone else noticed? It frightened her to think of it. Better to believe they hadn't.
She stopped painting her face for a while until she realized that she could cover it up and still be pretty. There were no other defects, and that relieved her. It left her mind to focus on the one.
She never got rid of it, and she never got over it. She never showed herself, and no one ever saw.

IF.

If. The most iffy word in the language other than maybe. But more than maybe. More: a conditional statement. A maybe that has possibility. A maybe that's not completely empty.
If this, then that. A hypothesis-like statement.