When someone asks if you're alright, it's shamefully impolite to disclose anything but an augmented aberration we deem the truth. 'Fine' is the lie society stamps on an inconsolable soul. Seldom do we confess with candour what are feelings really are. Our whole culture is built upon an empire of lies: calling psychiatrics a charlatans' business, calling dieticians a passing fad, and proclaiming dentistry as practice founded on vanity.  We do ourselves an injustice with our heedlessness towards health: body and mind.

Is this stoicism a British-centric attitude, encoded into my DNA, or perhaps learned? Or is this deplorable behaviour universal?

Anything in reality that we cower at, we distort instead of combating. I'm a prime example: too radical is it to realise the evidence of our own eyes and see evolution is at work presently. Evolution is looming large over us like the childhood monster we all try to wish out of existence, dwarfing the whole human race with its shadow. And evolution has extended it's mutilated mutant hand to me in a gesture of alliance.

And I have become one with that monstrous force.

I am the aberration.

I'm the shifted decimal point in the IQ. I'm the 'two' in the binary 'one's and 'zero's of life. I'm the extra helix in the deoxyribonucleic acid.

No longer the homo-sapien, I am the pivot point, the next evolution of humans to inhabit the earth. The homo-superior. 

But I'm just a teenager written off as psychologically unstable; what do I know? For all I know my entire reality to could be a delusion: but I can't allow myself to slip into the trap of questioning my own sanity. That's a slippery slope, my friend.

Then again, look at me! Jotting down things in this diary as if it could converse with me. As if it had ears or eyes. As if it had thoughts or opinions! No, no -- come now, Charles; slippery slope!

My point is, right now I am 'fine'. I am taking my mother's engagement just 'fine'. My life is 'fine'.

Some days I feel invisible... Which reminds me: I have unearthed a new trick in my repertoire.

The household phone trilled, it's shrill ring like the shriek of a banshee, forecasting peril. Having gathered dust from desuetude, it's unnatural tolling felt like funeral bells. And an omen in was on the other end of the line.

Kurt and his abominable son were to attend dinner.

Often I wish I could evaporate; like condensation from a bathroom mirror; my corporeality to evanesce, my mind to transcend the impediments of the mortal form, autonomy beyond the autocracy of the body. To be immaterial, immortal, illimitable.

Unfortunately, I cannot unleash my mind from the bindings of this materiality; but my new parlour trick is making play I can.

At the sound of the latch unclipping, and the rain pouring in through the doorway, hammering on the wooden floor, I recoiled. Like phantoms in league, a crack of thunder superseded their manifestation.

I recoiled, wanting to fold in on myself like one of the origami paper flowers that Raven crafts to pass the time, I felt just as flimsy as a leaf of paper in that moment.

Sitting across from Raven in the drawing room, I dog-eared the page of 'Origin of the Species' and set it down at the foot of the settee. I'd been scolded before for educating myself when we had guests attend; and my mother didn't like the reminder of my father - it being his book - when her latest gentleman was present; if gentleman he could be called.

The drumming of footsteps approaching on creaking floorboards, I tried to compact myself into a corner of the sofa, compress myself into inexistence, crumple myself into insignificance, but alas, as the door to my sanctum opened, and I remained.

The sound of the latch clicking open was like the cock of the pistol, and the creaking of the door opening like the gunshot. In strode the hostiles, their pack headed by my mother, already drunkenly swaying and stumbling. It was amazing, she could get through two bottles of gin by midday, but resorted to whiskey in the evening: she once explained, something to do with how one is refreshing, the other is warming.

Who cares? I can't touch a drop until I'm 21 in this damn country. Ludicrous. You can drink at any age in your own home in Britain, the catch being you have to be eighteen to buy the alcohol.

But who really regulates it and checks for ID?

No one. That's who.

My mother's gaze trawled over to Raven, then narrowed, then failed to find me. The brutes flanking her looked equally bamboozled, then again, it doesn't take much to flummox an amoeba. "Where's Charles?" She snapped, much like the crack of the cane the teachers delighted in cracking down on my palms.

Raven turned, pointed and opened her mouth to direct them to me, but was confounded. "He was here a second ago, reading his book." Confusion wasn't I look I often saw etched onto Raven's features with her perceptive blue eyes and cunning smirk.

"Can you go and find him, please, Raven?" She requested, dismay etched onto her face, a fretful hand combing through her disordered strands.

And like the obedient and angelic child she was, she scuttled away to doctor my mother's demands. She strolled right by me, looked straight through me, then skipped briskly on.

Convinced I'd eluded all of them, I scrambled to my feet and scrabbled after her. My clumsiness, however, forsook me; I tripped over a rusty nail in the floorboards. The illusion - I've no better word to call it - failed as I flopped like a sack of spuds. It was comparable to the failed act of an escapologist.

"Charles?" My mother cooed, her brow furrowing.

Foolishly thinking I was still concealed from them, I peered over the back of a sofa. My mother, Kurt and Cain were staring directly at me.

"For God's sake, Charles! You're eleven years of age, what on earth are you doing on your hands and knees like a toddler! Stop acting like a ruffian, and start acting like a Xavier! Get up and get our guests a drink!" The irony being she was treating aforementioned ruffians like royalty.

So I stumbled over my apologies and swiftly took my leave of that room. Any distance between me and the Markos was good.

I am unsure if I can attribute my invisibility to my own wish to be unseen, or everyone else's.

I've told Raven what happened. She's the only person I can tell about these things; we're alike in our uniqueness. Like an investigative duo - Holmes and Watson! - we're discovering our capabilities.

She believes me.

She believes in me.

Who knows what I would do without her? The blank pages of a book are the eternal listening ear; unbiased, unprejudiced, unjudgemental. The thoughts that are trapped in my head like clawed beasts in a cage, are allowed to roam free on the plateaued savannas of the page, their footprints inky trails of script. It allows them to run free, allows me to abdicate my duties of hospitality towards them, and to shut the book on them. But a page cannot reply to me, provide me with an objective perspective, wrap an arm around me or place a kiss on my cheek.

Raven, however, can. And does.

The day I take her for granted is the day I am no longer deserving of her love. She has no obligation to remain a resident of Westchester, and even less of an obligation to masquerade as my sister and perform the duties of a sister.

Raven is one of my outlets: healthier than succumbing to the primitive emotions and acting on them, and healthier than internalising what I feel.

And it's dizzying how we've cycled back to my opening statement; I can repress my emotions unremittingly. If my emotional baggage doesn't naturally disburse as time claims it, it starts to take a toll like a heavy sack: digging in in places, sapping strength from muscles I ignore, affecting my ability to move -- or to move on.

If I refuse to allow it to emerge in its pure form, it will manifest in other ways. Despair, ire, numbness, it all boils down into anxiety, which simmers away quietly before boiling over in the form of a panic attack. I just have to remind myself from the heat sometimes; avoid the factors that cause me to overflow.

Anxiety is a broth comprised of equal parts self-doubt and self-hatred, toxic to anyone who harbours it, and is as hard to rid as a toxin. It corrodes got inner workings, it's acidity melting your rationality, it's toxicity eroding the essence of your being and malforming the very thing that makes you function. The antidote? A healthy dosage of narcissism and sense of achievement; something a trifle hard to come across in our household of drunks and freaks.

The trouble is letting yourself feel it. There never seems a convenient or appropriate time for feeling.

It's the contemptible catch, the we, as human beings - and yes, for now I am identifying as one of the masses - are not machines. We are illogical, irrational and inconsistent in our behaviours; we are guided by are emotions rather than mathematical sums, but follow those emotions as blindly as a heat-dealing missile, if fooled, lead astray to self-destruct. I try not to let my heart govern my head, to draw the distinction between facts and opinions, but too often one impostures as the other, and I am mislead by the duplicitous front.

Another thing that irks me is the rampant sexism of today, and it's the modern day! Bygone are eras absent of technology, or exploration, yet the sexism still loiters like a bad smell. I'm not just preaching about the wage gap, or women condemned to domestic duties, or the oppression of female sexuality, I'm talking about what men suffer. If suffering, it may be called.

Women across history have been wrongly defined as fickle types, histrionic, inferior, and completely ruled by their emotions. And men? Quite the opposite: practitioners of reason, fortified, phlegmatic - and surely no human being is above the trials, traps and tribulations of emotions?

Men are expected to be. It's 'emasculating' to express any kind of emotion, it's 'effeminate' to show vulnerability, it's 'unsexing' to appear suffering.

It's 1951! Why are we still enforcing these gender roles and stereotypes? Take a look at the shape of the world, anyone could perceive that these things simply aren't true! Who knows where these God awful stereotypes come from when their such deluded deviations from the truth?

I won't conform! I refuse to!

But there's a conflicted part of me that wants to project that flawless image of the level-headed man. I don't want to feel or appear vulnerable, but surely that's not just restricted to my sex? Surely it's universal that people don't want to feel weak? I can't see any reason why you would choose to feel pathetic.

And this is probably how the stereotype is perpetuated and passed down through generations. Isn't it about time we broke the cycle?

I've strayed so far off track, I've almost forgotten my destination. Ah, yes! Dinner!

It went as you might imagine, silent looks of spite, more pig-pen scoffing, and my mother drunkenly flirting with her fiancé. There's nothing quite as repulsive as seeing your own middle aged mother getting handsy with a slobbery slob like Kurt: touching on thighs, copping of hips, and caressing of necks. Intimacies unsuitable for children - or certainly Raven and I, who knew what fifteen year old Cain got up to in his free time; but as if a lady would go near him - or any public setting. And with the dinner table as full as it had been in years, I call that public.

I'm dreading the wedding day. Because then, there's no turning back.

A/N - This is the replacement for a chapter of 'Budapest' today, it was written Monday this week as a contingency for me getting hungover this Sunday -- which I am. I hope this suffices and fulfils all of your Fanfiction needs. It's been so long I'd forgotten how much I love writing Little Charles Francis Xavier!