They deserve it all.

Emerson

"What are you doing!?"

"Mom ..." She's spinning in front of me. "I think I might have gone overboard." I smile, but it fades when a wave of sadness overcomes me.

"My sweet ..." She takes a step forward, a gasp stuck in her throat, her hands on the way to caress my face, but they stop mid air and retract.

"You're mad at me ... please don't be mad at me ..." I'm trembling. It's cold. And the blanket is far too hot, it's why I pushed it away from me and slightly and accidentally ripped it up. My hands feel like they're burning. Only the headboard feels good, like little ... tiny ... small clouds for under my head. "Mama ... please."

She comes to sit next to me. Her words as she looks at me are so very hot, like the pit of the stove while it's on, no, like the center of the earth, like pure magma ... and it burns right through me until a hole has been punctured right in between my eyebrows, it keeps burning until brain ooze is leaking out.

"Mama ..."

"You're shivering."

She grabs the blanket and covers both of us, me in her arms, her trying to comfort me. I had quit smoking weed for 3 weeks now, and I was doing really well ... until she popped up again. I was doing homework and suddenly, instead of writing my own name at the top of my paper, I wrote her name. I scratched it out and wrote my own name again after slowly and softly spelling it out for myself. Then later on that day, when I was listening to a recap of the last 3 chapters we had in class for English and writing down things I thought were important, I turned out have written her name many times. I thought that maybe I needed a break, so I lied down and I wondered why I was still thinking about her.

I had a new dealer, one who always wanted to give me new stuff. I almost always refused and just stayed with my trustworthy weed. As of lately I was no longer smoking it, instead I'd look at it and be ... proud of my achievement?

But it had been 3 weeks and I woke up and I felt this overwhelming itching feeling all over my body. I couldn't see straight and then I was gone, into a small pastel hole, it moved towards me and it swallowed me whole.

I am alone. Alone in my room. It looks the same but it feels more magical suddenly, and I realize why when I see that there is a flower planted in my floor. And I look at it, cautiously, and I realize it's real. So I get a little closer, realizing something that my mother and James had been working on for years is now just growing in my room although I hadn't seen it before, but something seems too beautiful about this. It seems almost fake, but I'm so convinced I move closer to it. And when I look it, I'm bewildered, it's something I just can't seem to grasp, something I can't seem to understand, my brain can't comprehend how beautiful and real this is, even if it's not.

I don't stand up, I lay back down. My hair meets the grass of the flower and my eyes meets my ceiling which is now skies, blue purple skies, beauty and all, captured in my eyes. Our skies were mostly gray due to pollution, yet what I'm looking at, something I don't even question, is so ... beautiful, too beautiful to doubt.

But somehow I'm not too phased by the fact this is all an illusion, all magic, all fake. I get it, maybe it's a hallucination, maybe not ... who knows, who cares.

I close my eyes and wait for everything to feel more real, more appealing to stay than to stand, but when it doesn't, I suddenly get this overwhelming urge to climb up a tree. And that's when I remember the day I went crazy for the first time, the day I killed that servant, Willow's first real kill in my body. I remember this this part, I remember the tree that appeared, I remember crying, wailing, bawling my eyes out and yet still somehow ending up on the top of the tree. It might have been the first time, but it wasn't the last. I remember thinking around the third time that I couldn't fight it and I just stayed, I kept sitting down and somehow I'd still end up on the top of the tree. But ever since being in the Human Lands I have never climbed a tree, its branches now grazing my skin and its leaves tickling my face. It isn't until I have climbed to the top, my feet standing on what looks like sturdy branch, that I realize how many trees there are, making the sad realization dawn on me that no matter where I'd go, no matter how I'd fight, there would be a tree nonetheless, and with that there would be a power to take me to it. They seem to be infinite, never ending, beautiful, fathomless, something I never thought to see.