Wyzard's Wyld Euphorium

Please don’t interrupt me, I have something to say…

Ghost Hours;

My rhythm never matched this world, it seems I’ve always danced to my own drum.

I remember being 5.

As a small child, sleep just wouldn’t come. Instead, exhausted mornings became my norm.
“Get up & go to school, everyone else does. If you’d just go to sleep like everyone else, you wouldn’t be so tired every morning when the school bell rung.”

When sleep would grace me with a random visit, pain would surely follow.
Waking in the in-between, crying from the pain, my mom would give me baby aspirin & tell me:
“Stop crying! It’s just growing pains—it’ll go away.”

Night after night the cycle played like a broken record, haunting me to this very day.

My tiny body grew resentful quickly.
“Why wouldn’t this just go away?!”

Not once did I see a Dr. Instead I was blamed for being this way.
“If she’d just go to sleep, things wouldn’t have be this way.”

You think I didn’t hear the judgement & resentments in your whispers?
You’re just a room away.

One thing’s for certain—darkness becomes your closest friend after so many hours laying awake while the world sleeps & you beg for it to all just go away.
A quiet dark house is filled with ghost & fae who begged me to play.
My only friends who heard my muffled cries when the pain wouldn’t go away & you couldn’t bear the anger from waking an adult who was just going to blame me anyway.

Because if I’d just went to sleep, this would have all went away!

Mornings turned to fights every time I said, “I think I have the flu.”
“Stop lying & get on your shoes!”

But I wasn’t lying. Somewhere, hiding deep inside, I actually begged to be normal.
At first, I actually wanted to go to school.
But soon that was buried so deep beneath the brain fog, the daydreaming & ADHD, as I fell further & further behind.

Over the months & years the tune changed, but the message remained the same:
“If you’d only…”
“If you would just memorize this list… why won’t you just do your homework like all the rest? You aren’t even trying. Stop lying!”

You see, I wasn’t actually stupid. I wasn’t the one lying. I actually was listening—oh how I listened to so much more.
I could hear the resentments in the undertones of your voice.
I saw every glare you thought you’d hidden.

Maybe I couldn’t read the lines because I was too busy decoding what’s in between.

By 4th or 5th grade, I’d learned the rules to your games:
Don’t make a scene.
Fake it until you make it.
Never let them see you cry—because what follows is surely just more lies.

But I wasn’t lying.
Why couldn’t anyone see?
Why wouldn’t anyone believe me?

I made a promise in the dark—the ghost & fae who had become my very best friends would never fade away!
I wouldn’t let them.
I’d tuck them in my pocket & as soon as I found a way out, I’d take us all away!

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