The rain dripped fondly on the sheen glass of the windowpane. She sighed deeply in affection while staring at blurred nothingness. The view had never been more beautiful as it was with a layer of rain to look out from.


It represented everything she felt, a thunderstorm of waning love keeping her away from the bleak reality of life beyond. There was only a noiseless peace, a wonderful lack of distractions. It was her. It was the dream.


It was as if she were in some game of hide and seek, and her turn as Hider had not yet ended.


For as long as she could, she would stay hidden.


A blanket of shivers settled along the back of her neck and the deep end of her stomach while she caressed her imagination with a sense of yearning. When life let her see the world through a new lens, she could do nothing but take the new, accept the new, adapt to the new, and live the new.


While she still could.



Youth would fade over time. She hurriedly sucked in the memory of the moment and kept it under lock and key in the core of her mind. Never could she forget.


Solitude was comforting in its silence. She sometimes found she resented the mangled and dramatic businesses that came in one package when entering teenhood. Confusion and frustration, then, overwhelmed and toppled the sanest of people when accompanied by complaints from friends, unforeseen arguments, exhausting distress and awful family situations.


Sometimes, it did her good to get away, just for a little while.


Eventually, she knew, the rain would stop pouring and reveal what truly lay beyond the horizon, probably something nasty, something she would fail to handle, something that would be the final straw.


She took a staggering breath when realization coldly blew in her face, and she asked herself the dire question: Did she really want to go back?


It was probably a century later, but the tears finally began to flow, dripping in slow, staccato beats onto the wooden floor, forever to leave their mark of her sadness.


There was nothing left in her world.


In her isolation, there was really no need to care about life. If she went into the abandoned room beneath her, and if she opened the drawer she knew would hold the precious glinting knives, she could end it. She could end the sorrow, end the pain, end the fantasies.


Because what she wished for was a bag full of happy endings, and, with her parents gone, there was no more chance to get it.


So she would go ahead with the plan. She would grab the knife and plunge, as she had so often seen herself done in her dreams. She hurried to the stairs and took a step.


And then there was a creak. Oh, sweet distraction, so small and insignificant, yet it gave her a lucid moment to snap out of her trance. There was no telling who, or what, could have joined her in the peak of her decision. Then again, it didn’t really matter.


An image of her three younger brothers, all smiling up to her, looking up to her for guidance, only longing for a helping hand to bring them past their confusion, emerged uninvited. How cruelly death could act, tearing apart happiness, giving the weak a reason not to live.


She wrapped a hand around her neck in sudden fright, realizing how close she had been, how death had almost flicked its tongue at her, a slithering and silent creature.


Yet it all would have been her; she would have given herself over.


Was that really the way to go? To take her own life, and leave the rest behind in a blind decision?


For she was blind. There was no clear path she could follow, nobody to reach out and hold her hand while she trudged helplessly along that road of life to finally get to…


A flower bloomed in whole and she tentatively touched it in her mind, unconscious that doing so suddenly gave her hope to keep going, to never stop moving until she reached a wall.


Here, she had reached the smallest of hills, created because her parents’ bodies, buried unevenly in the earth, stood frighteningly in the way. She could leave their lives behind, but keep their memories. It was all there was to it.


To simply… persevere. That fork she would reach down the road would come in time, and she would face it head on, strong in her being.


She took the final steps to reach the main floor of the cabin and headed in a different direction than the room that had held her thoughts for days. She opened the front door as the downpour turned to a drizzle, lightly spilling drops onto the green filled ground.


How… beautiful… it all seemed, even in the last minutes of the day. She frowned as she stepped out into the mess, her conflicting feelings still at war.


The sun was not to appear again that day. She watched the sky for several seconds, willing any form of light to lead the way. There was nothing.


She put her hands in her pockets and shivered in the night, starting home. A clot formed in her throat, a sign for the wrong choice. Indecisiveness barred her way, caught her in her tracks until she was shaking with grief.


Up ahead, calls wafted their way to her ears. She heard them, but did not listen while her face became a mask of tears once more. That she would keep convincing herself her choices were wrong… She loathed herself for it.


“Where are you!”


The shout jolted her and she fell in the wet mud, sniffing.


A twig broke somewhere to her left. Footsteps padded the forest greens. Wind made the voices clearer, until it seemed they were on top of her. And always, they asked, “Where are you?”


It took a great push, but she put her hands firmly on the ground, not caring that the dirt stained her palms so nastily. With a staggering breath, she stood and wiped the remaining tears from her face.


It was as if she was trapped in some game of hide and seek, and she had just taken on the role of Seeker.


For as long as she needed, she would keep on looking.


Three voices called vehemently to her, and each voice struck her so forcefully, so passionately, that now it was hard to respond, hard to ignore. For now, she nodded to herself; for now, she had to try.


“I’m here!”