Love of Darkness

The city was bustling that night. Broken neon signs sparked on and off, and the sky was dark and sprinkled with stars, like a subtle painting in the backdrop of a place alive with action. A young man with dark hair adjusted his shades and threw on his black hood as he pushed through the maze of car fumes and impatient drivers. For some people, darkness was never enough.

Kaylee looked down from the top of the building. Someone was honking at him, obviously annoyed at his attempt to zig-zag through the rows of vehicles. He cursed, which was most likely targeted at the person who honked at him, but it could've been at anything. He seemed really mad at the world.

But there wasn't much to be mad about. It was a friday night, and the weather was really nice. The smell of alcohol, cigarettes, sex and excitement loomed in the musky air. Everyone was trying to get a taste of San Francisco nightlife and see if crazy things really do happen here like all the myths promised. People came to this city with high expectations and standards and to experience wild nights that they would never forget. Just that fact alone made Kaylee proud to live in as special of a place.

The ledge where Kaylee's pale hands rested felt wet. She looked up and splayed out her hands to feel for raindrops. Just then she realized how nice the cool Spring breeze felt on her face, and her long lashes went down with her eyelids. She quickly opened them again when she felt the same wetness, only this time it was on her cheek.

She wiped away the solitary teardrop and sighed. That always happened. Every time she cried, she wouldn't know unless she felt the tears with her hands. To other people, her eyes looked red and puffy, but she could never tell herself. She could see just as clear as when she wasn't crying. Her eyes just seemed to go numb.

On top of that, most of the time she would cry for no reason. There would be no pain, no misery, no suffering to correlate with the falling of tears. Of course, she did have legitimate crying sessions from time to time where there actually would be a reason, but that wasn't usually the case. Not only would she not be able to tell when she was crying, but she could start crying for absolutely no reason, and sometimes it would be when she was with other people.

But she didn't think much of it. As soon as she would start wondering why she was crying, she would get distracted by other thoughts. She was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder in the second grade, along with an anxiety disorder. Her parents were quick to put her on medication as soon as they were told by her teachers that she seemed to have some problems focusing and interacting with other students. She was too young to understand and to object to the medicine, so from that point on she had been swallowing pills every day for ten years, which should have masked her strange symptoms.

They seemed to work for a long time. After second grade and all throughout middle school she managed to get decent grades and to have one or two good friends. In seventh grade she took up fencing and enjoyed it until she quit her freshman year of high school. She had never been good at keeping hobbies or relationships. Her life was like a rocking horse; always moving back and forth, never stable. Perhaps it was her personality that was rocky, not her life. It was hard sometimes for her to even find a connection between the two.

She was a tall girl with wavy, light brown hair, brown eyes and skin like Snow White. Her limbs were unusually long and seemed out of place with the rest of her small body. Her hands looked alien-like and her feet somehow resembled question marks. And a few months in her senior year of high school, her mind and behavior began to scare the shit out of her.