The constant blinking of a straight small line on a white screen.

The constant unblinking eyes of a Boy who has been sitting on a chair for hours, neglecting the pain in his back screaming at him to please stand up for just one minute, and the pain in his side, screaming at him to please lay down for just one minute.

His raggedy face enlightened by the bright screen is the only thing a hypothetical spectator could see in the darkness of that room, except for little sparks of light trapped behind eternally shut blinds.

Words rushing inside his mind, he can see them in his eyes, forming a beautiful composition on the digital page in front of him, he can feel them running around in his head, often banging off the surface, he scratches his head.

His seemingly dead eyes open wide for a matter of seconds. Usually, when this happened, his hands would begin beating down on that keyboard and words would come running into the page, filling it with not just digital ink but emotions and feelings and charming lines used in the rightest of contexts.

But his hands stand still today. He had the power to feel the words in his head floating around and then streaming down to his heart, his magical heart, getting washed in something unearthly beautiful, becoming more than just words in that instance and then splitting up, a bunch to the right and a bunch to the left, swimming inside his arms, giving meaning to his muscles, inside his wrists, like the blood in his veins, and then bringing life to his hands, on the tips of his fingers they would be born and brought into the world. Words into the world creating new worlds.

But now the words are trapped in his head. Forever floating around, for years, a few of them would find an opening one time or two or three, and they would manage to escape that purgatory and reach for the heart. But perhaps his heart was not magical anymore. The words, shining with the bright light of hope, would get tangled in this black mass, blacker than ink itself, a black hole of sorts, eating the light away from them, as they scratched and they crawled, until the words were no more.

The Boy knows there is no hope, for he can feel this happening inside him. He can feel the viscous, pitch black substance that substituted his magical heart.

He is supposed to look around for inspiration, but he doesn't even bother for his eyes have surely adjusted to the dark but there is nothing remotely inspiring about the mess in his room. He is supposed to listen to the sounds of the world, but he's been wearing headphones for as long as he can remember, yet he's not listening to any music.

An unexpected light appears right under his field of vision, dim yet bright enough to divert his attention, he knows immediately it is his phone that he silenced and smacked on the desk face down so nobody could bother him, even though he knew nobody could be bothered to bother him. He waits until the light disappears. His eyes want to go back to decay by staring at the white screen but his curiosity always got the better of him. He picks up the phone and turns it on, a feeling of remorse invades his stomach. Another message pops up right as the screen is about to turn off again, a terrible smile lights up his eyes.

For the first time, he takes off his headphones, he wants to listen. Nothing but sounds of cars, throttle, brake, streetlights. He puts the headphones back on.

He knows he needs to go to the city, his friend needs him. But sometimes he just can't help but feel as if the outside world is no place for someone like him.

He minimizes the white page on his computer, he knows he could just as well close it altogether but never does, he shuts everything off and stands up two seconds later, the lower of his back cracking in satisfaction as he does. He feels stuck after all that sitting time, he presses a closed fist against his back and leans backwards, letting every single part of his back crack. He feels like he can breathe again, until the stinging pain from the thorn planted in his left side almost blinds him and calls him back to a vertical stance. He checks his left side, the thorn is still there, his white t-shirt dirty with blood; it looks infected.

As he goes out, he remembers the time when he used to bother with making his hair look perfect, with dressing up nicely. How long had it been since he last went out, he cannot remember. But he can recall it was for the same reason as today. He is momentarily blinded by the outrageous light of the outside, is it summer? The cars he heard from inside seemed a lot more than what he is seeing now, even though the noise is now much closer yet still muffled by his headphones.

He walks the lonesome road until he sees the sign ahead of him: Emerald City.

He remembers when he first moved here, the name of course was the first thing that caught his attention. There was a time when he used to shine about as bright as an emerald, when he had a reasonably large emerald in his back pocket, ready to put it around the finger of an Angel who simply needed a new pair of wings. That time faded out and he had always looked back at it as his golden age, though he could not accept the thought that it was gone and it was time to move on. He wanted to go back to the golden age, and Emerald City seemed to be the perfect place.

It was indeed a beautiful city, a once-in-a-lifetime spot where all kinds of beauty from the past met all kinds of beauty from the present, merging together into what would be the beauty of the future. Yet all this beauty was not enough to make the Boy shine anew.

He knew that perhaps he needed to find the golden age inside of him and not outside, so now he felt as if the city and all its glory were simply laughing at his face. That's why he closed himself in his room, why he spent too much time in there. He could not draw inspiration from something so big, he needed something much smaller.

And it was dramatic irony that the source of the last time he ever had any inspiration was on that same street he was walking, ahead of him in the distance. He stops immediately, steps back and hides behind a wall. Takes a deep breath and looks.

There she is, looking stunning as ever, walking with that unsuspecting grace, a wing on one side, a Man on the other. A hypothetical spectator would notice that spark in the Boy's eyes appearing for the first time in a long while, and they would think there is still hope for him.

He remembers the last time her supernatural eyes laid upon him, the last time they were together, on that hill where he was looking like such a fool, as he tried to get her to fly but she couldn't, for she was missing one of her wings.

He remembers the last thing he said to her: "I swear to God, I'd never heard a better sound coming out than when you're whimpering my name from your mouth."

He remembers the last thing he heard that Man walking beside her say to her: "I've got an insatiable desire for your insides. It's undeniable, I'll conspire and pull against your body tonight."

He keeps looking from behind that wall, the two of them walking closely, as the Man does not reach for her hand, does not look at her, and simply mumbles something and laughs, coughing up feathers.

Everyone around him argued that the Man loved her very much, the Angel herself argued that too. The Boy, instead, behind his back they argued that the Boy did not love her, that he just wanted her. How can they look into my eyes and still they don't believe me? the Boy thinks to himself.

He tries to ignore the last thing she said to him: "You can't fly these wings, you can't sleep in this box with me."

The wound underneath the thorn in his side bleeds and he winces in pain. He remembers what he's in the city for, and finds the strength to look away from the One Winged Angel and get moving.

He meets his friend by the usual place, ruins of what the city used to be, what those people who call themselves artists thought of as a better past, it just looks like a bunch of broken pillars and rusty stairs and dirty ponds and old trees to him. He wonders how a place can be filled with so many memories and objectively look the same but still not look the same to him.

His friend looks at him with a sad face. "I'm a disappearing act done poorly, but if I ever get it right, you'll miss me sorely," his friend, the Girl, says to him, he can still hear her over the headphones so he does not take them off.

He puts his arms around her and she loses herself inside of them.

As she backs off, her arm hits the thorn in the Boy's side and she looks at the blood, she seems perplexed, she asks but he tells her not to worry about it, he wants to know what's new with her.

She begins to speak to him, telling her troubles away, she tells him she had traveled away from Emerald City to find an anchor, "I needed someone to depend upon, I was alone, I was emotional," she says and begins to speak of someone he's already heard of.

"It was the person I'd been counting on, it felt good, it felt transitional, a feeling I'd been waiting on," she tells him and he is genuinely happy that she has been good.

But now that she returned to Emerald City, it does not feel like home anymore, it does not feel like the place where she should be, she feels like a chameleon with nothing to blend in with.

The Boy used to think of himself as someone who could easily understand people's frustrations and troubles, someone who could look into someone else's eyes and immediately tell what kind of person they were. But whenever he looked inside the Girl's eyes, he couldn't. Her eyes, they were like a Kaleidoscope.

He thinks perhaps that's why they matched so well together, as nobody could read the Boy's eyes either, at least not in the right way.

The Boy begins to tell the Girl a series of lines that do not come from his heart, but from his memory, because his heart does not have the power to produce lines anymore.

The Boy's lines don't help the Girl and she throws herself face first into a spiral, and spiraling down she goes into her darkest places.

The Boy believes to have the cure inside his head but he cannot get it out of there, he cannot feed it to his black heart, otherwise he won't have it at all anymore.

And so he simply listens to her, coming in and out of her darkness, unable to help in any way possible, he feels like his head is about to explode, for it cannot contain that many unused words, but he cannot show it to her, so he tries to remain calm but he can't, he can't, he brings one hand to his head, he brings the other, she is sinking, he is exploding, he lets out a scream.

The Girl is done talking, he raises his head to see her eyes worry. She asks what is up with him, seriously, but he does not want to bug her with his problems, she insists.

He tells her he used to be able to save even the most desperate of people, that he used to be radiant and it was contagious, that whenever he was down people around him would learn to be happy from his sadness. But he cannot do that anymore because he is stuck inside his own head, and he is unsure he still has a heart. He says he can't save her, not while he's living, living like this.

The Girl tells him that she doesn't need him to save her, that he should stop trying to save people and maybe save himself, because nobody is going to save him.

He argues she needs him to save her, she just doesn't want him to. He tells her he has come to a point where he just can't be saved anymore.

She tells him such a point does not exist, not even for her. She tells him he's strong, that he has survived everything thrown at him and he has always stood back up.

He tells her he's not strong, he just knows how to start again.

She sits down and produces a piece of paper from her backpack, she begins to write. He steps toward her, his side hurts as he does. He asks her what she's doing.

She quickly says she is writing, that she feels inspired. He feels envious.

A matter of minutes later she puts what she wrote in his hands, the paper gets soiled with his blood, he reads:

Start new,
With wonder of a wide-eyed youth,
A land without a chart,
And a history without a mark.

The Boy smiles. The Girl doesn't.

He tells her that what she wrote managed to warm his heart, she tells him it is not enough to warm hers. The Boy loses his smile and looks down, he wishes hard for some words to escape his mind and reach his warmed heart, and they do. But he loses them in there, never escaping from his heart.

The Girl says she needs to travel more, she cannot stay still, in that place that is now suffocating her, as beautiful as it is. "I'm a patient wave and it's an easy ride," she lies.

He sits down next to her, adjusts the thorn with his hand, grabs a piece of paper from his pocket and opens it. The Girl reads:

When your chips are down, and your drinks are all gone
I'll still be here, wishing and waiting for you to come home

The Boy says it is the last thing he wrote, a long time ago. The Girl says that warmed her heart a little. She is the only one who believes him. How can they look into my eyes and still they don't believe me? How can they hear me say those words, still they don't believe me?

Every time he wants to write something new, the same four thoughts come to him in repetition from his memory. Nothing new escapes his mind.

The Girl puts her hand on the side of his face. This reminds him of the few times he was with the Angel and the words got stuck inside his mind, how he would start panicking and every single word in his mind would get contaminated with a negative coil.

The Angel simply put her hand on the side of his face and it all went away, everything was back to normal.

He backs off from the Girl, pushes her hand away from him. He is about to ask her what is passing through her mind when she puts both her hands around his face, he is forced to stare into her eyes.

As he does, he realizes he has never looked inside her eyes for this long, never had the courage to get lost inside those Kaleidoscope eyes.

He finds the courage.

He sees something revolting, he sees a horrible face with those same Kaleidoscope eyes. He sees something soothing, he sees the wind blowing in a sunset of many colors, the same colors of the Kaleidoscope eyes.

The Girl takes her hands off the Boy's head, his headphones falling in the process. Many sounds begin to convey to his ears, the sounds of the world, like that time he was on top of the hill.

He stands up suddenly, starts walking in reverse.

The Girl stands up and walks toward him, produces a bunch of white paper from her backpack, the Boy snatches it from her hands.

They never looked into his eyes, like he never looked into her eyes.

He looks at the paper with wide eyes, quick, he feels the flowing inside of him, he needs to write, puts his left hand over the paper, blood starts dripping on it.

The flowing stops, his eyes go back to normal, he nods and smiles in the form of a grin.

With his right hand, he reaches for the thorn, wraps his fingers around it and slowly pulls it away from his body. He does not scream, though his vision turns to black for a few seconds, and when it returns, he can see the thorn in his hand, freed from the body.

The Boy with the thorn in his side was now only a memory.

The Girl looks on, worried but with a hint of pride in her Kaleidoscope eyes.

He stares at the thorn in his hand, breathing heavily, he looks up at the Girl and speaks: "In the sickness of you, I'm just a white blood cell, fighting like hell for you."

He smiles again, but it is a real smile this time, and with tremendous speed he sticks the thorn right into his heart.

The Girl jumps, perhaps screams, watches his right hand lose the grip on the thorn, his left hand lose the grip on the papers, flying softly to the ground, and she begins to run toward him, but is stopped by something sinister occurring right before her eyes.

An odd, pitch black substance flows around the thorn lodged in the Boy's heart, like living slime, it slides down his body, down to his knees, all the way to the floor, invading the white papers.

The Boy falls flat on his back, but the substance does not stop flowing away from his heart, into the paper.

The Girl inspects closer, thinks it looks not like living slime, but living ink, and it seems to be turning into written down words into the paper.

Impossible, she thinks. She had always been one to be rational, to not believe in the paranormal or the magic, unlike the Boy, such a thing is totally ludicrous. But how could she deny what is happening right before her eyes?

Several minutes later, there doesn't seem to be any more ink flowing, so she picks up all the paper from the floor, she begins to read.

Her Kaleidoscope eyes open wide and, like camera lenses, they focus on just one color for the first time in her life.

The Girl with Kaleidoscope eyes was now only a memory.