The Air Bubble - Part I of II.

Silently in a moment of brief solitude with her bedroom light turned off, her bedroom door recently slammed shut, the teen was slumped across the large bay window, knees held tightly together up against her face, with both her thin, pasty-colored arms tightly wrapped around her legs, her hands interwoven so tightly that they were even whiter than her skin showed usually.

Motionless, she stayed there. Oblivious to the background moans and the ear shrieking shouting match that emanated from downstairs, as she simply continued to gaze up at the clear cloudless sky far above her through the drawn-back curtains. Full of admiration for all its splendour, wishing that she too could be like what she was could see. Ever so slowly and without warning her usually soft blue eyes began to glaze over with a hint of tears welling within herself.

Full of tiny lights scattered far across the blackness of the night sky, they provided a source of pure white luminescence that portrayed nothing but hope and inspiration to her mind.

This was something that she had been doing for the last six months. As the shouting matches continued mostly every night, this had provided her with just a little piece of equilibrium to her young life so far. She always gained a sense of thanks for nights like this, almost as if the silent and ever-present night sky was calling out to her, offering her hope that it wouldn't always be like this... just one day. It never failed to make her smile, but tonight it wasn't working too well. Never before had she ever sensed tears welling up in her. But tonight, they came and they broke the surface from within. Tears formed one by one and suddenly poured down her cheeks, sploshing silently across her light pink tee-shirt. No sound came from her as they descended, almost as if she had no words, no cries to cry. She was too numb within to feel pain for crying out.

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Laura was just a fifteen-year-old girl trying to fit in with school, her family. Oh, her family! Her parents were constantly bickering and picking fault with everyone & everything. Laura had a younger brother who was slowly wasting away, dying, and nothing or no one could do a damned thing to stop that. Sure, every medical unit had seen, assessed, and treated him with both prescription medication and invasive surgical techniques for the past year and a half with no success to this day. Following much intervention and long hospital stays, the doctors had reached that hard decision that no parent or sibling ever wanted to hear.

That their son, her younger brother was slowly dying, and nothing was left that could be done to save his life upon this earth now.

The bickering? The constant moaning had been a sadly all too common a situation at home ever since the doctor had disclosed that awful news. Laura's parents were unable to console each other through their own grieving. They simply felt anger, hatred, guilt, all because neither could rectify the sealed fate of their son. Laura was sadly stuck in the middle 'just like a guinea pig stuck within the spokes of its own wheel,' unable to break free from the heart-rending event.

Laura's parents simply behaved in a way that they could no longer think of their own daughter's needs. Laura had been left to fend for herself every day after the disastrous news had been broken.

Herself, fifteen, timid and heavy-hearted, not only because of her thoughts she held for her younger brother but, of the aftermath from her boyfriend (who had dumped her after a year for another girl in her class.) He had left Laura just less than two weeks ago and it hurt her like hell every day, so much so that she despised attending school because her ex would be there. Every day she set eyes on him with 'the other girl' she felt as if she was forcibly being made to have her heart ripped away from her all over again. She couldn't cope with any of that. Laura had stopped eating and was making herself sick after each meal her parents set down on the table for her. Unaware that her daughter was like this and emotionally suffering from the break-up, they just could not manage any of it for the depths of their own grief-stricken lives.

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So, there she sat, hunched tightly within herself, perched on the sill of her bedroom window, simply hoping against hope that things could be so different, you know, just like the stars and the sky were right now.

Finally, everything in the house rang silent. Laura could hear the front door slam shut, and all that was to be heard faintly was her mum's nearly imperceptible sobbing. Seemingly to her, her dad had stormed out as he had done so every singly night since the news was given over her brother. She was unable to comfort her mother as she didn't know what to do, what to say, what not to say, for her own feelings of loneliness and inadequacies.

Looking up at the skies above her through the double-glazed windows, her moist, now reddened eyes from the endless streaming of tears, she suddenly smiled as she saw what she perceived as a blazing comet slicing through the night sky, its strange appearance almost turning the full heavens above her into an impromptu light show. She was struck by its awe and clean energy, an unexpected beauty tow itness during such a saddened moment in her young life. Time was getting on now and absolute quiet had now fallen through her home. No more could she hear the pained weeping from downstairs, just a pure eery silence stayed behind. Her dad had obviously still not returned as the quiet fact was that, she had not been jolted by another slam of the front door as with earlier.

Laura slid down from where she had perched, choosing to leave the curtains open, so as to shed some starlight into her room, rather than flicking on the harshness of the electric lighting which did nothing for her feelings of loneliness and subdued mood, as the artificial glow simply exemplified the coldness in her heart that she felt. She stumbled out of her room across to the bathroom to wash her face free from the subtle sticky feeling that her drying tears had left, let alone the monstrous smudging left behind when her mascara had trickled into clumpy blots under her eyes. The sudden warmth of the water almost made her feel refreshed and alive again. Not by much, but enough to clear the fuzziness from her mind and leave her able to realize that she needed some desperate sleep, or to at least try.

After patting her face dry, she trampled back to her bedroom. Sighing deeply to herself she stripped herself down, and not bothering to slip on any nightwear, she simply pulled back the quilt and threw herself onto her bed, snuggling herself deeply under the quilt and nestling down into her soft pillows. Laura was no longer crying, part effect of the water freshening up her face, part pure exhaustion. Through the bay window she lost count of just how many stars twinkled across the night sky, thinking & wondering to herself about how it all looked so peaceful, so perfect, to her. In stark contrast to the many complications that were existent in her life that is. Laura made an attempt to close her eyes, filter out the stress and sadness that stood for everything in her young life so far and, tried to imagine just how it would all be if the world were vastly different, what it would feel like to be high among those stars in the skies above, soaring through space without any earth-bound stressful days.

But then, what would she know, she was just an innocent fifteen-year-old girl, stuck in a world full of problems and hatred. Drowsiness took her if only for a shortened time, as she slid silently into an unreal, but for the moment at least for her, the slumbersome, unbound and unjudging waiting arms of Morpheus.

Tomorrow? Well. Tomorrow was another day, wasn't it?...

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The 2nd and final part of this short fiction will be coming soon, so stay tuned.

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