My name is Doran, I am fifteen years old, but somehow I feel older. There is something strange about me. Something I can’t define. I feel things others don’t. I watch people and feel their thoughts, and somehow I feel separated from them, but in other ways I feel separated from myself.

I am me, but who is me? I know that I exist, and I can feel my boundaries collide with others at contact, but my edges feel withered, as if part of me has been torn away. Strange feeling. The human body, the vessel, it harbours that which is me, but somehow I feel entrapped, as if this body is a cell, confining me.

This vessel is that which I know, where I perceive my reality, but sometimes I slip through that reality into feelings of claustrophobia, sometimes I think there is something wrong with me. Sometimes I question the “real” world everyone perceives…

 I feel… this well of energy calling to me for release, to make me bathe in its soothing touch, but I am scared that I will drown and never come back again.

Doran finished his diary entry and gazed at the words that he had released through his hand, it was something compulsive, something he needed to get out of his system. He heard the quiet mutter and gazed over his desk to his window, watching the rain drops land onto the glass, trickling down the smooth surface into patterns connecting with each other.

            Then came a flare of lightning, casting a brief glow across the room and lighting the hills outside, followed by a deep cracking sound. Most found that sound chaotic, but Doran found it soothing, it seemed to become alive and send a current running through his body.

            He sighed, contemplating the product of his self expressed literature, storms always placed you into a pensive state of mind. They had the energy of both destruction and beauty, but then again, there was a sort of beauty in destruction. Not that he enjoyed destruction in anyway, when he had heard on the news the other day about a terrorist attack killing hundreds of people he had cried, not only for the victims, but for the suffering the protagonists must have been through to commit that horrific act. But he felt that placing himself out of a human orientated state of perception, there was a beautiful side to it. The act of destruction brings the cycle of new beginning.

            He stared out of his window viewing the terrain of Cornwall, southern England, the trees and plants flailing in the wind, briefly lit up by a flash of lightning. Doran closed his eyes as he felt the strange surge of energy run through him, followed by the grounding sound of thunder. How he wished he could run out into the atmosphere, feel the rain glaze and cleanse his skin, brace his hands out into the air and rejoice as he felt the wave of electrical storm course through his body. But something apart from the thought of his parents and neighbours reactions held him back. It wasn’t time, not yet.

            He decided to retire to his bed, where he could rest his thoughts in a subconscious state while the storm ravaged outside. Not that sleep brought much to him, he often woke up feeling more tired then when he retired, and he could never remember his dreams. But stormy nights always brought out the best in him in the morning. A scream of thunder echoed into the room, calling him, but he could not hear, he had fallen to sleep.

(C) Richard Turner