Chapter 1

She sat by the fireplace, with big tears slowly trickling down her face. She’d never felt this way before, she’d never had such strong urges to cut & bleed. She had never before wanted to hurt herself. It was a cold snowy night, snowflakes were slowly falling from the great sky above, as if being thrown by angels. The snow fell in such a manner that it was slowly meeting to form heaping mounds of white fluff.  Ally just sat there,  as quiet as a mouse , she had lost her desire to live, she no longer wanted to be present, to be seen, touched or heard. All she wanted was to leave, go to a place where no one could find her, a place untouched by human claws. Ally had always been a very cheerful person with the with the most amazing zest for life ever to be located in the core of a single human but, she is no longer this way. She changed, people started fading away while she slowly succumbed to her state of depression. Ally was depressed and she knew it well, but even though she had figured it out a long time ago, she had never shared it with anyone or anything , and no one was ever suspicious. Her mother wasn’t  much help, she called it an “attitude issue” she just thought her daughter was growing lazier and angrier  because she was rebelling or “acting up” as her mother  referred to it.

Ally’s parents  had gotten divorced not too long ago, and it had taken the most unpredictable toll on her body, mind and soul. She stopped eating and grew ridiculously thin, she was depressed and let her grades slip from straight A’s to straight F’s. In Ally’s course of life there were two things that had always perplexed her, drugs & alcohol. Before the divorce she thought that they were the most foul human creations. But now   they were the center of her life, her life revolved around them. They were her joy, the friends she could always count on to ease her pain away and her forbidden sanctuary. Devils seemed to be taunting her weary & fragile mind. They seemed to drive her feet to the cellar, they appeared to take possession  of her hands and slowly maneuver them to the bottles filled with intoxicating joy. It was them – the devils- not her own self that wanted to drink to the point of oblivion, however what Ally herself knew was that those devils made her pain go away, even if it was only for a short period of time.

All these thoughts flew through Ally’s mind as she watched the flames crackle, leap and dance their way into her tearful eyes. She blamed her parents for her treacherous state , she blamed them for all of it, the sadness, the pain, the shame… it was all their fault! She would cry for absolutely no reason, bursting into tears in the middle of the night. She couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t  eat, she didn’t have the power to give a sincere laugh or even a smile. She was a corpse amongst the living, making her way through a hopeless, pointless life with no goal or aim.

It was approaching mid-night & the entire household was silent, everyone was asleep, but for some reason Ally found the task of sleeping  impossible to accomplish. She continued gazing at the fireplace and sobbed hysterically, she was calling out for help but no one could hear, no one could listen, no one responded. Life seemed tasteless, bland and impossible to live. She had the occasional flashes of suicide that grew more and more stronger each time. She was living through a horrific self-conflict, on one hand she wanted to leave the world and never to return to it ever again but on the other hand there was a small, low voice in the back her head telling her to continue and  trying to show Ally the light at the end of the tunnel. That is what Ally goes through every day, caught between two fires, between the  dreadful reproaching flames and the  joyous happy  ones that seemed to lurk around in the distance.

Chapter 1 (part 2)

Ally had lost track of how much time she had spent watching the fireplace, she could have continued gazing at it for hours , but something interrupted her special moments with fire. It was her mother, she had stumbled out of bed to get a glass of water when she saw a somber figure sitting by the fireplace, at first she was too drowsy to notice who it was. But she eventually discovered that it was her daughter.

“Ally?” asked the mother.

“Oh, hey mom…” replied Ally.

“What are you doing up this late? It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

“I… I couldn’t sleep.” answered Ally.

“Well, in that case at least cover up with some blankets. It’s freezing in here!”

“ Ok, thanks mom.”

“Then I guess I’ll go back to bed,” said her mother.

“Sure, goodnight.”

That was probably the first in weeks in which Ally had engaged in a proper conversation with her mother. Usually all they did was practice scream therapy together, every time Ally saw her mother she knew they would end up screaming, howling and yelling like  a pack of wolves. This unfortunate meetings of daily screaming really hurt Ally, it cut through her like a knife and she could feel its full wrath on her body and mind. Things weren’t much better with her father or his new-found girlfriend. Ally and her father would fight on every occasion whether it was on Halloween or Thanks giving, every little thing such as the clothes she wore or the way she chewed bubble-gum would result in a volcanic eruption. No matter what she did, fighting was always a daily part of her life, she couldn’t imagine a day with no screaming or yelling, a day without her inner-demons being unleashed, it was just impossible. As she thought of that she remembered her secret stash, and she just had an impulse to get its contents into her already deteriorated frantic body.

She slowly climbed up the stairs counting each stair as she went along, till she reached the ninth step, at that point she stopped and  looked around. When she was sure that she was completely and utterly alone she bent down & moved the dusty dislocated floor board  revealing her stash of intoxicators, some dope, a bit of marijuana and little vodka bottles were all in there. She slowly pulled out the last remaining marijuana bag and slipped it in her pocket. She then put the floor board back in place as quietly as possible and tip-toed into the living room. She got a set of matches, put on her sweater and walked out to their patio. She didn’t have to go far, she just took a few steps to the front she then turned right took about five steps to the right, she pushed away some of the snow with her shoes and shook a large floor-board out of place revealing a trap-door hidden underneath. She had discovered it when she was seven years old, she pulled up the trap-door and made her way down the ladder. She then hopped off the ladder and landed on safe ground, she started feeling around the walls till she found the light-switch, she switched on the lights and closed the trapdoor. The luminescent white rays shone so brightly that Ally had to cover her eyes till they got accustomed to the strange creature called light. She had been in the dark for so long, that she forgot what light looked and felt like.

She started looking around, remembering the great times and laughs that had once cheered and delighted the spacious air and mood. She had decorated the place and made it her own little home away from home. No one except for one of her old childhood friends knew about the place, not even her parents knew about it. She considered it to be a safe haven, a place she went to when she needed to weep, a place  where she could be herself without people’s judging eyes confronting her from every corner.

She plunged down on the little couch she had down in her “haven” and started crying again, even though she had no apparent reason at that moment, all she did know was that there was an enormous sense of vagueness in her heart that she couldn’t fill up no matter how hard she tried. She sat upright & wiped her tears off with her woolen black sweater. She then reached into her pockets and pulled out the marijuana, she hesitated for a bit while her inner-demons went through their daily routine of tearing apart Ally’s poor soul.

But at the end, the demons won –as usual-. She lit a match stick and lighted the drugs and started consuming. Then all of a sudden a paroxysm of emotions swayed through her, it was a combination of emotions: sadness, anger, ecstasy and a variety of other feelings & emotions. After she finished her heavy journey through the strangest emotional roller-coaster, she felt very drowsy  and plummeted down into the couch where everything went black & switched from the real painful life of Allison “Ally” Johnson into total complete oblivion.