When Will The Tide Turn

Layla sat there crying in Adrian's arms with Seth rubbing her back until it became dark. When the bright waning crescent moon had fully risen she had decided to risk returning to her cold and unwelcoming home. Slowly she made her way on the abandoned streets, until she came to the familiar off white, green shuttered, house. The whole way dodging the street lamps that made her seen in the dead of night trenching through the dew covered lawns and wet sand leftover from melting ice in the climax of winter.

When she walked through the door she saw no one awake so she silently crept her way down the stairs and into her basement bedroom. She was what Meridith liked to call a cellar dweller. As Layla came into her room she felt the overwhelming surge of tears come upon her. She was overly tired she knew that, but she was also in pain, so much fierce pain. Layla's head pounded, her eyes burned, her cut was throbbing with a healed pulse, and her knees were weak. No to mention the extreme heaviness upon her chest from an oncoming anxiety attack.

Layla's pain was not needed to keep her mind from over thinking into the bad conflict she needed, yet refused, to sort out. She was too tired for any of that, so she allowed herself some pain relief. Layla swallowed more than the recommended number of Tylenol tablets, for her height and weight, for a quick response and hopefully a decrease in the pain. Then a few blows from her aspirator took care of the rapidly forming anxiety, chest pain. To top off all of this medical treatment Layla grabbed a soda very high in caffeine and a handful of pixie stix to keep herself awake.

Slowly Layla's whole body numbed and the overpowering demand for rest became harder to fight without the aches and pains to keep her up. The sugar and caffeine were just not giving her the adrenaline rush she needed to keep her watering, tear filled, eyes open. Layla felt herself fall into the deepest of sleeps as if she were being submerged into a blanket of water less than a fraction of a degree away from being declared frozen. Layla blacked out on her mattress fully dressed right down to her beaten-up high-top converse. Torturous sleep was sometimes unavoidable.

Yet dream filled sleep was avoidable. Weather it was Layla's mind was to tired to sleep, or she was just too tired to awaken in the middle of one of her dreams causing her to remember them, Layla did not recognize the difference. Either way she had gotten off lucky with no dreams. So when Layla finally awoke, late in the dust of a new day to the bird chirping for their early breakfast in front of the sunset, she felt well rested and completely distressed. The dark shadows under her eyes had alighted a tremendous amount.

Layla came to the conclusion that it would be best to just stay in her room for the day. Being a Saturday and all it wasn't to much of an inconvenience, and was the safer route than risking confrontation with her,lately, overly stressed mother; who, Layla believed, had spent another all nighter in the city at her work building organizing old lost files and writing reports on all the resent, yet always boring, activities going on within the staff team trainees. It was best to just stay out of her way because you did not want to become the subject to her overflowing anger, that needed to be released at some point. Layla just preferred not to be there when her mother unloaded.

So she stayed in her room and wrote. 'She sits quietly, in her poem filled notebook. Nobody knows her, and no one cares to ask. Just another pale face in the overcrowded school. No importance what so ever. Oh but if they only knew, what was running through her mind. They would have given a damn about who she was. She knew exactly how many stars littered the sky. She could count all the raindrops that fell from the clouds. She will tell you to what height a certain tree will grow. Something you would never know.'