niles {8} 'caterpillar' || CB

It was rather ironic that he was always trying to be someone else. Stuck between white sheets and white walls there was only ever Niles to be found within the folds of the mattress and as many times as he locked eyes with whatever demons he hid within, he ran from them just as quickly. Beer bottles broken over soft skulls, the smell of vodka upon skin to be soaked up like some sort of ambrosia for the damned- it haunted him. It scared him. Drunken merriment and bitter kisses made him want to be sick, to wrap his fingers around a porcelain rim and purge most every memory brought back by drunken lips across his flesh. It was those memories he hid, somewhere in between the notches of his spine, that made him so despise himself.

Oh, how he yearned to simply become another. To wake up one morning and be anything but what he was.

His wish was granted in a little girl named Alice. Not all that much smaller than him but with storybooks inked in her brain, so vibrant that he felt it possible to touch the words she spun with her tongue of silk. And if he believed in her, he needn't believe in himself any longer.

There are cigarettes stashed beneath his pillow, ones that leave his throat dry and his lungs aching in perhaps the best way. A kind of way that softens the pounding of his heart and stops the splitting of his skull. Fire devours, clawing away at his insides with every pipe he packs and pill he chews. It is the farthest he can run without a single place to go.