Plight of Amour.

“I am not me when you’re not with me. I am alone. And that of me which remains, I don’t want to be. Outside the sky hangs crooked. And your farewell letter on the wall. I am not me when you’re not with me. I don’t want to be anymore.”

I belted out the lyrics as loud as I could, trying to find comfort in their words that meant so much to me. The only way to escape my prodding thoughts was to sing or repeat a song by him several times.

It got things to shut up pretty quickly.

Currently my good and bad voices were telling me what I should write next in Plight of Amour. It got annoying, especially when the good voice called the bad voice a moron and the two started fighting at full volume in my head.

That was about the time I started singing “Ich Bin Nicht Ich.” It took a lot of time and focus to translate it from German to English, and then get the words to fit in the same beat. I knew my voices wouldn’t be able to force through my difficult thoughts then.

I smiled at the cleverness of my head as I ran my fingers through my conditioner slicked hair.

The gentle scent of strawberries swirled around in my shower stall, circling around my head like a dust cloud. It was intoxicating after a while, especially when I began mixing it with coconut body wash.

I stepped back into the falling water and watched the soapy bubbles slide from my skin and disappear down the drain.

I sighed deeply. It was nice. I loved my quiet bathroom. My safe haven from Rillia or Teniell or any other visitors that would find it fun to check in on me.

No one ever bothers you when you’re locked in the bathroom.

I stretched my arm out to grab the face wash from the shelf in the wall. With an audible pop, I flipped the lid open.

“Calla. Calla, Calla, Calla!”

I closed the bottle and put the face wash back on the shelf. Just when I thought all was quiet and peaceful and nice…

The bathroom door opened.

Rillia pounded inside and ripped my shower curtain back. I stared at her in disbelief.

“What are you doing?!” I yelled.

Rillia jabbed her thumb over her shoulder. “You have to come downstairs!” She grinned.

“Why? I’m in the shower.”

She grabbed my towel from the counter and handed it to me. “Then get out. Really. You’ll love what’s downstairs.”

I turned the water off and wrapped the towel around my body. I didn’t bother to comb my hair or even put clothes on. I simply followed behind Rillia, gripping the top of the towel to my chest.

Rillia skipped down the stairs and yanked me into the living room.

“Porch,” she ordered, pushing me out the front door.

I stumbled out onto the front porch. The relatively warm wind chilled my wet skin and I shivered, cursing at Rillia for making me come outside.

“What did you want me to see?” I growled, becoming quickly annoyed with the situation.

“Calla, are you blind?” Rillia asked incredulously. “The driveway.”

I rolled my eyes and looked where she told me. My gaze made contact with a white truck that read “Uhaul.”

I smiled. “Oh my god! Is our furniture here?”

“Mhm!” Rillia jumped up and down, shaking the frame of the porch all around us.

“Now I can write!” I clapped.

I would finally be able to type what I wanted until my heart was content. I wouldn’t have to sit around and write it in my diary. Nothing made me more impatient then having to put pen to paper. I would much rather use a computer because I typed much faster that I wrote.

Try one hundred eighty words per minute.

Two men—one around forty, the other about twenty—were pulling boxes out of the back of the truck and were depositing them in one corner of the porch. Three were already sitting there.

One of them caught my eye. It read “Calla’s Works” in permanent marker.

“Ah, my books,” I said, walking over to it.

Rillia joined me at the boxes. “Hey, I forgot we brought those.”

I smiled and laid my hand on them. “My lovely projects. The reason I have all my money.”

The mover men pounded onto the porch and dropped two more boxes among the others. The forty-year-old smiled at Rillia.

“Would you like us to take the boxes up to the rooms? Or are you willing to do that by yourself?”

“We can take the small boxes, but we aren’t strong enough to take the big things.” Rillia was thickening her tone with seduction, her secret mechanism of getting people to do what she wanted.

She was an all around sneaky twenty-one-year-old.

I stepped backward, away from the man to start heading back into the house, but the other mover stopped me.

“Hey,” he said.

I raised an eyebrow, tightening the towel around me. “Hi?”

“You’re cute,” he stated.

“Thank you. I hear that a lot.”

He eyed my towel.

I knew that face. I knew that exact expression. Every guy I met looked at me like that, like they wanted to throw me to the ground and screw me mercilessly.

But those looks meant nothing to me. If they weren’t coming from the familiar, beautiful brown eyes that I loved, then I wanted no part in it.

I pushed passed him and hurried into the house, water splashing to the floor with each step. I ran up the stairs and burst into my room.

/-/-/-/

I opened my office door slowly, afraid of what was inside. I knew the movers had placed all the boxes titled “office” in the room, but trying to sort through all my things and set my computers up would be a hassle.

My desk sat in the middle of the room with my dead desktop computer on top of it. A bright blue rolling chair sat beside it; on it was my laptop. Across from that was my old bookshelf.

Four boxes were lined against the farthest wall, underneath a window. One was my box of books and finished products. Two more held my computer equipment and another had all my decorations for the walls and my desk and whatnot.

I crossed over to the boxes and grabbed up the one that held my books. I tore the tape off the top.

The first one in the pile had bright white letters reading, “Dark Eyed Dreams.” It was the first book I had published, the one because of my Father.

I dragged the box over to my bookshelf and started organizing my six books onto the shelves by the date of when they got published.

Dark Eyed Dreams, In The Night, Carnival Lights, Forget To Breathe, Asphyxiation, Take Me, Angel.

I aligned them perfectly with the spines facing out.

I finished with that and went to my desk. I plugged all the cords in, put my chair in front if it, sat down, and pressed the on button

It flickered, hummed, and the screen lit up.

I leaned my head on my hand and watched it boot up with a wide smile. I missed my trusty computer. It was always there when I needed to vent my feelings, write things down, or just cry.

After I had everything typed in and set up, I brought up a blank page and started typing away, at the speed of light, remembering everything I wrote.

Eleven o’clock passed. Noon followed, one, two three…The afternoon drifted away before I could respond.

Rillia came into the office at some point and gave me dinner, but left immediately when she saw I was working.

I ate without tasting, but barely ate any of it. Instead, I got out the stash of candy I still had left from my trip with Finn and began snacking, hoping that the sugar would help me think and stay up later than usual.

Plight of Amour was coming along great. It was strange, because I was adding things that had never happened in our relationship. And suddenly the sexy hero of the story was back, but it wasn’t at the right time or under the best condition.

How my mind came up with things like this I would never know.

I stuck a crystal of rock candy in my mouth and leaned backward in my chair, my eyes scanning over the words that were written on the screen.

“That sounds kind of stupid,” I muttered, backspacing the last sentence I wrote. “He…looked at me…that way for…several moments. It didn’t…seem that long…but it was just the exact amount…to get my heart pounding.”

I nodded in satisfaction at the new sentence. Much better.

I leaned back again in my chair and glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen.

“Oops.”

It was 12:56. I hadn’t even set the rest of my office up.

I saved my story and shut the computer down. I, however, was much too tired to do anything else with the office. I would have to get Rillia to help me tomorrow.

I shut the door as I left.

I slid into my bedroom, trying not to be too loud. I had no desire to wake Rillia up from her beauty sleep.

I flicked on my overhead lights and was taken aback. My room had everything set up. My bed was made with my sheets and my blankets. And my walls were covered in the little magazine clippings and all my personal photos, exactly like I would have put it up.

No boxes sat where I could see, so Rillia must have wanted me to feel happy in my bedroom and not have to do anything more than work. Or it was just a ploy to get me to let Teniell read Plight of Amour—which I still hadn’t done.

I grabbed the picture frame sitting on my nightstand and fell backwards onto my bed, staring at it.

All the pictures I had in my bedroom were old, from my other life.

Bill and I had been camera crazy when younger, having documented every moment we spent together.

In the frame was the best one that I had.

The only picture I had of us kissing.

Well, it wasn’t the only picture that was ever taken of us kissing, but it was the only one my father didn’t burn.

Rillia saved it for me during Father’s rampage. He couldn’t stand me being depressed anymore, especially now that I was an author and had everything I possibly wanted.

He was wrong, though.

I had nothing I wanted.

I never wanted this career, this money.

All I ever wanted was to be with Bill, but he took that away from me and burnt all the pictures I cherished.

He only took the ones of us lip locking. He later explained that none of the other ones mattered; none of the other pictures I owned of us together said anything about our relationship, so I had no reason to be depressed or sad anymore.

God damn him.

Yes, I said it.

God damn my father to the deepest fiery pits of hell.

He destroyed every happy thing in my life, made me this lifeless, emotionless stranger that I didn’t even recognize, that I didn’t understand.

Rillia was right.

I was a zombie with no color in my cheeks and not a sane thought in my raging mind.

Something wet hit my ear.

I swiped my hand across it and quickly realized I was crying. Tears upon tears ran down the sides of my face and fall all around me.

I pressed the picture frame to my chest and cried. I let out all my sorrows, crying and sobbing until my throat ached.

I finally lost consciousness at close to four in the morning.

I fell asleep with the picture of Bill and I pressed against my wet cheek.