Emptiness. Hollowness. Like you're trapped in a glass bottle. Like the whole world is a glass bottle. That's what I feel right now, as I smile and laugh with my friends. The laughter grates and cuts me. It feels so dead-cold. So dead-cold like fake green grass. Like everything. 

I lick off the ice cream on my spoon. It's too sweet, too cold, and too chocolate. More flavours than I can name dance across my mouth. And I am surrounded by people. But I feel alone. 

All I have is this ice cream in its swirling mass of colours, this sunlight that doesn't seem real, these seats that are soft and plush and warmed but hard and cold anyways as they dig into my thighs and back. 

There is music going on in the background. But it doesn't mean anything. Not really. Sure the words tell a story about lost love and vengeful rage. But that doesn't really mean anything. I don't know why. 

I drift through my thoughts as I stare idly at the paintings on the walls. They whir with colour. So much colour. They don't feel like home. Nothing feels like home. Not even my own thoughts. 

I take another bite out of the bowl of ice cream lying before me. Look at the crystal vase of flowers in the middle of the table. The flowers look like they're bleeding. Cut from their stems and alien and sharp and sorrowful. But at the end of it all they look hollow. 

I have questions in my mind. Questions I can't ask in this restaurant booth, with its black tourmaline embedded into the booths and fake stars shining as lights from the ceiling. Questions I can't ask in this company. All too-bright, distant smiles and too-crowded, suffocating embraces and too-happy, hollow eyes. They feel joy. Saccharine sweet joy. And I feel joy too. But the joy feels fake. 

We laugh at a joke and the laugh comes from my chest but my chest is empty, there is nothing. I don't know how I can laugh at this joke. I don't know how I can't laugh at it. I don't know how I can laugh at all. I don't know how I can go a single day in my life without laughing. Part of me wants to sigh but the sigh won't come. 

Fake fire made of coloured crystal rises bending and arching from the floor to line the walls. It's beautiful. So beautiful. The way an empty white paper plate is beautiful. Like the way a knife sliding down your rib cage is beautiful. 

There is so much beauty all around me. And I can see all of it. But I can see none of it. There are so many people around me. But I can feel none of them. I'm lost. Lost from even myself. I don't know what I want. 

"Do you want to order some garlic fries to go?" My friend asks us. I love garlic fries. But not really. But I answer yes anyways. Part of me thinks it will be fun. Part of me thinks there's nothing else to say. 

We walk down the sunny, busy streets with paper bags full of clothes in our hands. So many clothes. So many of them were lovingly picked out for me. I wish I could throw them all away. Burn them in a fire and pour the ashes down the sink and see what's left after that. What's left of myself after layer after layer after layer of fabric and skin is peeled off. 

We talk and there are kiosks of people selling toys and trinkets. I stare at everything as if wanting to commit it all to memory. I stare through everything as if I'm seeing nothing at all. My friend buys something expensive. Something robotic. Some line of plastic penguins sliding and dancing around an icy hillside. You can barely tell that it's plastic. It's glaringly obvious that it's plastic. The world is plastic. Everything is plastic. Everyone is plastic. 

I'm exhausted as we walk to the movie theatre. But I'm also brimming with energy. I forget whose plan it was to go watch a movie. I only want to go home. But I want to watch the movie. They say a movie theatre is an experience unlike any other. That it envelops you. But it's an experience just like every other. Crowded and filled and brimming and abjectly empty. 

I sit in my seat. And it's softness digs into my body hard and uncaring. These are leather seats. Well-maintained. I can tell that they're expensive. Like everything else in this world. Everything is so expensive that it's common and used and cheap. 

Everything is made painstakingly with the best of everything. Everything is so easy to overlook and so easy to get sucked into. 

The movie is not about anything. Well, no, that's a lie. It's about a family that is torn apart by some sort of war and so the girl goes on a mission to find everyone again. But it feels like nothing. The story is just going through the motions. Without any heart. 

After the movie the Saturday is almost over. We exchange kisses. They're soppy and too wet. I wipe the lipgloss from my cheeks with the wipes from my leather purse. The purse that's as light blue as the sky but nothing like the sky at all. 

I look up at the twilight-dark sky and I see a brief flash of /something./ The sky has secrets. I know that the sky has secrets. I know it deep inside the core of me, deeper than I can ever reach. I just don't know what those secrets are. 

I go to my car that's sleek with no scratches at all on it's new coat of shiny paint. It sits like a squat beast with no soul, staring back at me as I press the key into the silvery lock. I get on and I drive down the busy highways teeming with crawling beasts of vehicles. A ribbon of many colours. Of hard, metallic screaming.

I open the stained glass door that leads to my cavernous house. It's a house that eats me whole every time I enter it. Digests me slowly every second I spend within it. Spits me out every time I leave it. I duck and weave through all the furniture and ornaments and rugs and curtains. Up the cool glass staircase to my room. 

My mother and father greet me. I greet them back. Every day they go through the motions of being my parents. And I go through the motions of being their child. Their petulant, rebellious teenager. As sullen and prickly as all other teenagers are. I lock the door to my room and I knock offs the lights. 

I sink into my bed because that's the only place I have to sink into. And it's too soft. It chokes me, suffocates me all over with its cloying softness. I look out towards the city lights. The twilight is fading away and the city is glowing like a jar of fireflies. I've never seen fireflies. It's just how I've heard people describe it. I don't know how accurate that description is or isn't. I look past the lights that have no warmth and up towards the sky that has no stars. It all leaves me so very deeply unsatisfied. I look beyond all of it to the city Wall. The Wall that keeps everything and everyone inside. 

And for the millionth time I wonder, what could possibly lie beyond those great, thick walls. What are they walling us in from? What are they locking us away from? My mind dives through these waters until sleep envelops me. Warm and soft like a mother holding a child. Though my mother has never been thus. 

I wake up and I brush my teeth. The toothpaste is too minty and it leaves my mouth feeling artificial. Then I shower. And the water is the perfect temperature. Kept this way by sensors in the shower. And it drowns me. Sheet after sheet of water that I could spend all day in and desperately want to escape. I run my body over with soap. And it lathers luxuriously and leaves me feeling smooth and fake and plastic. I wax my legs. And my arms. And for a brief moment the pain makes me feel the faintest shadow of something. And then I apply a sugar scrub all over my body and that artificial feeling once again takes over. I make my skin and hair soft with oils and creams. And I step out into the gaping, steaming bathroom. 

I hide my face with foundation. Drown out my eyes with mascara and eyeliner and eye shadow. Shadow over the natural cut of my face with contour. I hide my lips with lipstick and apply a fake sheen with lipgloss. I look like a doll. I feel like a doll. All people are dolls. All there is is dolls. 

I put my doll body into doll clothes. The type that shows off my legs and my shoulders and my breasts. The type that everyone encourages me to wear. They want me to get a boyfriend. They don't know that I already have one. More than one. 

I hide the natural droop of my hair with a curling iron and after all of everything I am finally, finally, finally ready. 

I gather up my books into my backpack, and my sparkly notebooks and my fluff-topped pens. And I sigh as I swing it over my shoulder. I don't know how I'll endure another day. I don't know what else to ask for. I don't know what I want. But I know it's not another day of school. 

But I walk to my car again. And I begin. I drive. Past the low ache in my head and the wrong feeling in my gut and to the high, bright, well-lit hallways lined with motivational posters and yearbook photos. 

I sit in class after class after class after class. Subject after subject after subject after subject. Doing my best to listen. To learn. I don't know why I'm listening. I don't know why I'm learning. Of course I do know why I'm listening and learning. To get a job. To make money. To buy things. Many things. A house and a car and restaurants visits and vacations. My head throbs. I can't concentrate. I can never concentrate. 

At lunch I sit at the tables and I talk. About dresses and vacations and television shows and dream homes and nothing. 

After lunch I sit in class and I wonder why I'm doing all of this. 

But once class finally ends I can breathe, just a little bit. I tell my friends that I'm going to a club meeting. I secretly climb the spruce tree behind the school. I tumble onto the roof of the school. The lower roof. I duck behind a raised up block of concrete. To the little alley made by the block and the wall beside it. And there in the silence and the stillness of a world hidden from the world I meet my boyfriends. In secret. 

Marcus and Elliot. They're kind. They're rebellious. They're perfect. I kiss each of them in turn. We sit down on the concrete that's always too hot to properly be comfortable on. I love it. 

"I don't know. I don't know what I want." Marcus throws his hands up and looks at the sky. 

"The world is perfect. It's beautiful. So why am I so unsatisfied?" Elliot rubs his hands through his thick, dark curls. 

"I just don't know what the point of being alive is." I stare at an ant crawling up the wall. 

"Do you want to not live?" Elliot looks at me with wide eyes. 

"No, no. Actually. I don't know. I feel happy-bright-cheery. But I also feel so. Dead." 

"I hear you," Marcus echoes in a tired tone. "There's so much but it's never enough but whatever you do you can't make it enough." 

"Well said. Marcus I can't talk to anybody about this. Nobody but you and Elliot. Thank you for understanding." 

"Hey I don't understand anything." Elliot lies down. "But maybe I'm trying to. I don't know." He runs his hand rhythmically through my blond curls. It's the most soothing feeling I've had in a while. 

"Maybe we'll find something more. Something better." Marcus half-whisphers this. 

"Maybe we will," I echo. 

We keep talking until the sun goes down. I'm dehydrated and sweaty and the happiest I've been in a while. 

I go home and shower. And the water is the perfect temperature. And it makes everything feel numb again.