The Loner

CHAPTER ONE

It's fall, the trees bear no sign of life left in them and it's always bloody raining, you only know it's windy because you can hear it howling past the windows. She looks out the window full of hope and wonder believing that the world changes every day so she must too, but she fails miserably. She sits alone at home because braving the cold and unfriendly faces is too unbearable.

She spends her days trolling through Facebook reaching out to friends who never reply. She wonders if she will forever be alone in this world, if this is all she gets, is this really what life was for, working and sitting alone. Sometimes she thinks of what life would have been like if she had just stayed in school, if she hadn't taken drugs, if she had been an only child, if she hadn't made those silly choices. Where would life be now? So many regrets for a woman not even 30.

She feels forgotten and lost scraping the bottom of the barrel for energy every morning just to pull herself from the warm and cozy bed to just survive another day. She never feels rested, she stays in a constant state of sleep deprivation, her mind is foggy, her body has aches on top of aches, her eyes are always dark and puffy, she could be a clown even without makeup. She gave up on appearances a long time ago. After all, who is there to see it? Who would notice? Who would care? Her teeth are a dark yellow with brown tea and cigarette stains. Her hair has not been brushed in so long it's become one big dreadlock she just hides in a bun. When was the last time she washed? She doesn't even remember. When she walks her way to work in the rain that counts right?

She is a shadow of her former self, just a vague memory of who that person was. Who she is now no one knows, not even her. She goes by the name Zara but that is not her. She was originally Lucy Trutt when she grew up somewhere along the line she adopted a second personality that was when one life began and another started to end. She doesn't remember when that was or why it happened all she knows is she is now Zara, who lives alone and only leaves the house to work at her local store.

She sometimes does shopping but most of the time she just picks up a microwave meal for one after her shift to eat alone and forget about her day as fast as possible. She thinks the sooner she gets to bed the sooner it will end but that's never the case as each morning she still wakes and still continues on the same pointless stream of days. Like groundhog day same conversations about the weather, pointless chit chat with colleagues about their fun new experiences of which she cannot join in as she's never been out of her small town in Rotterdam.

Silly old Hamilton Hill. She doesn't know why it's even called a hill when it's practically flat. Seems the town owners were trying to brighten things up and make them sound more amazing than they actually were. She would call it Stupid Lake because the amount of times it floods the residence should all be ready with boats. She doesn't even live close to a river like you would expect. The closest one is two towns over in Spinnt not that she had ever been there. Sure she's thought about it a few times but who wants to travel alone? How bored she would be on the journey, no one to talk to, no one to see all the new probably very unexciting statues and probably old destroyed buildings. She tells herself it's nothing special so she doesnt feel so bad for missing it. One day she might, but then again she will probably sit and wallow for a long time yet.

That seems to be her way of doing things, her way of thinking. Everything is negative, sad and depressing nothing is worthwhile or looks within reach. She constantly makes excuses for herself and others, even when they are wrong. She wanted to join the police force when she was younger she told others she had applied and failed but really she never even applied. She convinced herself she would fail way before that. She knew she didn't have the grades she knew she was unhealthy, uneducated and majorly flawed. she knew she would be rejected although it made her heart sink to not apply if she had and failed what would she do without a dream? What is life with no dream? But then what could she do when hers was out of reach?

She had failed all of her life goals. Get great grades in school so she could go to uni and practice law…..failed she didn't get higher than a D! She wanted to find her Mr right at school, get married and have children…...failed. He left her for an older woman bigger and uglier than her who already had four kids! She wanted to own her own home before 30…..failed. She rents a one bedroom apartment! But she's glad it has a view even if it is just of the bus stop and one shriveled tree.

Sometimes she stares at that tree and waits for a section of it to break off, The weak part. She tries to guess which bit will fall first. She imagines that branch is her anger, that one is her sorrow, that one is her regret, her joy, her lovelife, her future, her burdens, her brain, her pity, her self worth, her laughter, her popularity, she goes on and on until she runs out of branches. She's so consumed by this tree being connected to her feelings and thoughts that she often gets angry and overwhelmed when the wrong twig separates from the tree. She didn't want her money branch to fall, she wanted her doubt to disappear. She can't even do that right; she often scorns herself for things she cannot control. She shouldn't put herself in the position to be disappointed anymore, she swore to herself that she wouldn't but she's always back to the same hollow and empty place.

The black whole of despair she calls it. That impressive, colossal never ending darkness she feels looming over her, laughing at her all the time, that inner demon no one can fight off, no one can see. That deep down feeling of outright inadequacy forever clawing at her back. The howling shriek of discouragement. that sharp, sour, tongue twisting bitter pill to swallow of just being so down right melancholy day in and day out.

CHAPTER TWO

She has to get ready for work and that torturous feeling of dread seeps in to take hold of her. She needs to work for money but she doesn't want to. She doesn't want to stand up, she doesn't want to find clothes or indeed throw them on. She doesn't want to do her hair or worry about the stench on her breath. She hates having to go out of the safety of the four walls. She hates the way she thinks others will look at her and judge. She hates the way she looks at herself and hates what she sees, yet has no enthusiasm or incentive to make it better. She's only going to work to avoid people and then coming home to lounge around in the chair. She very rarely has any strength within herself to do anything at all, let alone put makeup on. On those very rare occasions when she feels a little tug of hope and does make an effort to brush her hair and chew minty chewing gum to hide her breath it's never very long before something or someone shatters that hope altogether. Randomly every day despite all these feelings and the mental turmoil she finds the power to get dressed, tie her hair in a bun and leave sanctuary.

She walks those 488 steps to work with her eyes firmly affixed to the concrete pavement. She counts the 32 items of trash and 26 rubbish bins along the way to keep her mind occupied. She enters the local Mccalls store where she wastes six hours of her day restocking shelves, trying her very best not to be noticed, not to have interactions with strangers or worse someone who actually remembers her old self. She's always thinking of new inventive ways to excuse herself when someone wishes to enter discussions. She just about manages to give them directions to that ever hiding product that turns out to be right in front of the customers face, without sounding too sarcastic or condescending. She struggles to find common ground with others or likewise emotions and enjoyment as others over pointless activities. The weather is the easiest to discuss “isn't it pouring out there” “oh yes” is her go to answer for most things, any more than 6 words is too many in her mind. They may notice how weird and strange she is if she concludes the conversation. Avoiding that situation is her main goal. She keeps her head down, hurries about her duties and hides out the back as often as possible.

She has her grandmother's old chunky pocket watch around her neck. It often feels like that extra baggage she can't escape from. It's gold with a small silver border about 1 mm thick on the outside. The numbers are written in black roman, which she usually wouldn't tell the difference with. Which number is which? She only knows now because she knows there are only 12 numbers on a clock. How hard is that right? The centre is see through so she can admire the beautiful golden cogs turning working together. All intertwined like fingers of two young lovers hands. she often gawks at the needle slowly ticking around. Every second counts. She remembers her grandmother using those words all so often with her. When she was crying in her room for months on end. Those are the words that rang through her like church bells.

She often wonders if her grandmother is still with her. What she would think? How she would react to her life choices? If she would still feel love towards her. She misses those words of encouragement and wisdom. She didn't speak much but when she did she spoke with purpose. Slightly in riddles at times but now that she's older she understands them more. She misses her dearly. Sometimes she closes her eyes and her grandmother's face appears. She had wickedly grey hair like an old witch. All these little horns of hair would stick out however much she tried to tame them. She was ghostly white with wrinkles all around her eyes and deep distinctive laughter lines. She had the kindest eyes, the kind that spoke to your soul. The kind that would sparkle even in darkness. Her lips were always a pale shade of peach; she never forgot her lipstick. Sometimes she only remembers the image of her grandmother's cracked skull and bloodied face on the pavement where she died.

She was taking her to bingo like she had every saturday since she was 16. It was a ritual to play 3 full games and a lucky dip ticket that she would pick for her. They would walk along Gloucester Road and up FernBank. Her gran always struggled with the hill with her cane but she refused to take any other route. Typically the only hill in Hamilton but it was breathtakingly stunning. FernBank was the most beautiful in summer. The smell of lavender filled the air from all the fields it was like looking over a sea of purple. There weren't many trees so it was always hot and shiny. It was one of her favourite places where she could go and sit for hours getting lost in the countryside. So picturesque she would quite regularly bump into painters. She doesn't go there anymore. That deathly sharp corner where her grandmother was blind sided by a van ramping over the pavement. She never gets that image out of her head. The driver had been on his phone at the time and didn't notice the sharp bend. Her grandmother was thrown 6 meters down the road. Her skull was crushed on impact with the pavement and had caused too much trauma to the brain. She was pronounced dead at the scene. She wished it had been her instead. If she hadn't have been messing around in the field collecting lavender for her pillow maybe she could have pushed her out the way? Maybe she could have saved her? She often replays that moment, that split second where the van hit and then that sound that earth shattering bone crunching sound of her grandmother's head hitting the floor. She feels guilt and anger that she was frozen solid like in childhood. Suddenly that feeling of uselessness floods her body and she's left lifeless in the stockroom unable to breath, unable to move, just frozen in time. Useless freak, corrosive idiot, nasty bitch, callous just despicable, lower than pond scum she scorns herself when she returns to reality.

CHAPTER THREE

She's always been a disappointment to herself and others right from young. She couldn't save her mother, she couldn't save her gran she couldn't even save herself. Her mother hated her. The more she tried to please her the further away she would get. She was never happy with her and most of the time she would only make her mother cry. She felt worthless then and it's only got stronger since. When she was just 8 she ran home from school to show her mum that her poem had been published in the school paper. She couldn't wait to show it off. She was so excited she let out a little scream when the teacher told her. She thought it would make everything better. Her mother had been crying more and shutting herself away in her room. She based the poem on her mothers image on how she would light up the sky. She thought this would make her love her. She was wrong. For that day would be the turning point to just feeling sad to being utterly miserable.

She turned the corner to her house and noticed police cars and an ambulance. She started running slower the closer she got. She felt like she was on an elastic band that was over stretched and pulling her backwards. Every step felt heavier and more resistant. She didn't even reach the gate and she knew. She stood paralised unable to move, unable to cry, to scream out, to do anything. The piece of paper she had in her hand fluttered to the ground as she saw it. She watched them wheel out her mothers limp dead body. All she could see of her mum for the very last time was a bloodied arm and hand hanging off the stretcher. A deep wound across her wrist where her butterfly charm used to be. She never got to see that charm again. She has no clue what happened to it or why she remembers it so much in her dreams. If you can call them dreams. Monstrous nightmares of past failures and grief is a better way to describe it.

From that day the world was no more. Nothing was shiny, nothing was bright, there were no colours at all just shades of black. The sky was never clear, the rain never stopped, the thunder in her heart would never subside. She never saw her siblings again from that day. She doesn't even remember what they look like, their names or ages, just that she had two older brothers. She was pulled from the pavement that day by a lady called Rosie. A social worker who she would later realise to be the devil incarnate. She bounced from foster home to foster home for many years until eventually even they gave up trying to help her and left her in a halfway house. Nothing was safe there even if you left a half eaten licked sandwich in the fridge it would still be gone in the morning. She couldn't have things, they would always get stolen or cut up, destroyed in some way. Like her feelings. Like her hope. Like herself.

She started getting into trouble. Small things at first. She started skipping school just the odd few classes to begin with but it soon ended up in full days and even weeks. At one point she missed a full month and the teachers thought she had been in a car accident. She would take £5 out of her foster carers wallet, which soon changed to £10 and even £50 a few times. She met a dealer outside her school and started smoking. That soon changed to popping pills and sniffing powders. She didn't know what way was up. She felt better for those few hours that she wasn't sobre until being sobre wasn't possible anymore. Drugs became her life. She was just waiting for the next escape; she feared reality and the pain it caused her.

She made her own business at school. On the way in she would stop off at the Jewellers, steal a few bracelets and rings then she would go to Maxfactor and steal some makeup, false lashes and fake nails and finally the local superstore to stock up on cigarettes she bought with the stolen money. Once at the school gates she would sell all the stolen goods, charging 50p a cigarette and £1 an item. After all whatever she sold them at it was all profit. Once she had enough for powder and smoke to get her through the day, she would nip back home to meet her dealer. She would spend hours just messing about, setting fire to benches and even a barn. Nearing the end of school time she would walk back through the field and pick flowers. She tied them up in bunches of 5 with string. At the school gates she would sell the flowers at 20p a bunch and the rest of the cigarettes at £1 a go. She had it good for a while. She never had to feel anything the drugs stopped her from having emotions at all and she liked it.

She didn't want to have feelings she didn't want to have memories. She tried to escape the dreams many times but they never faded. She sat in bed many nights sniffing powder until she lost consciousness she had hoped she wouldn't wake on many occasions. She was always in the dark. She took the light bulbs out of her rooms at every house so no one could see her. For a while that's all she did. Got high got low and got high again. That part of her life is a blur now. She doesn't remember much of it. Just the constant moving from house to house but her school was always the same. The same school and yet she doesn't recognise any faces. Its busy all the time with children she doesnt know. They could have been on the other side of the world. It didn't change how lonely she felt. She could be sat around a campfire with all of them singing kumbaya and she still wouldn't feel close enough to them to talk. This was how she liked it. No one asked any questions so she didn't have to lie; she went through her days being invisible.

When she got put in the halfway house things changed. The other people staying there would often steal from her. Mostly just to get to her, just so she knew her place in the pecking order. Just one shoe or all of her knickers. They would shove her clothes in the toilet regularly, sometimes they even used it after. They would beat her to the point where she couldn't even lift her arm to get off the floor they had kicked her down onto. She constantly had bruises and was in and out of a and e. She had suffered 14 broken bones in the 2 years of being there. The staff members thought she would be better off in rehab. She was shipped off yet again to another dark and dingy room but this time she couldn't escape. This time she couldn't remove the light bulb and she had to face the music. She went through counselling sessions where they informed her she had split personality disorder and PTSD but couldn't treat it as she was at risk of abusing the medication. She knew they were right every second she was there; she was plotting schemes of how she could break into medical for a fix. She was there for 18 weeks in total but she only remembers half of it, if that. She came out 4 months clean and she hated it. She hated life, she despised herself, she loathed everyone and everything around her.

When she was released back to the halfway house things were painful. Every insult cut her like a knife. Every time they hit her she felt it. Life was unbearable. She didn't want to be alive anymore. Without drugs she felt such compulsive destain for the world. She tried to end it with a belt. She pushed the belt through the buckle and pulled it tight around her neck, She tied the other end to her window handle. She was saying her goodbyes to the world to her lost brothers to her mother and to every insect she had ever trodden on, staring at a tree from her window. when the door flew open. She was worried she would miss her chance so she jumped out. Stupid Rosie the devil pulled her back inside. The bloody devil Rosie made her stay in hell.

Rosie had everything removed from her room right down to the dressing gown robes and shoe laces. This was the darkest time of her life. She stopped eating. She stopped going out of her room. She ended up back in hospital with Rosie giving the Dr's permission to shove a feeding tube into her stomach. She had dark thoughts of killing Rosie and shoving tubes all through her body in revenge. Who was she kidding? She didn't have the strength to move from her bed let alone kill someone. The thought was a little cheerful though.

Her life had gone from one extreme to the next round and around. It felt like living on a carousel, same places, same events, same squashed complex hateful emotions. She was already dead inside; she was just waiting for it to end.

At age 14 her grandmother reluctantly took her in. At first she hated her grandmother. She hated that she was left there all those years to be tortured and relentlessly bullied by everyone who had the shame in meeting her. she hated that no one ever got in contact with her, that she was utterly forgotten about. She knew she was a horrible person she knew she couldn't make any good come to those around her. She often made situations worse and made people angry. She made her own mother kill herself so what hope did she have of making anyone else feel better. She knew she was different but never knew why. She knew she was too far past the point of return.

CHAPTER FOUR

She stayed in bed for months crying herself to sleep. Crying when she woke. Every now and then her grandmother would pop her head through the door lay a tray of snacks on the floor and vacate. She would hide herself under the cover until she heard the door close again. Sometimes she ate them and sometimes she didn't. She was just pleased to be able to remove the light bulb again. This was her bat cave of safety. She didn't have to do anything she never had to speak. She never had to go out that door into a world of evil. She started to like it. The darkness was her friend.

Eventually she adapted and started her own routine. She would wake at 2am when it was still dark so she could walk around the house unnoticed. She would open her curtains and have a look at the world sigh to herself and close them again. She took a shower and put on the same clothes she took off. The comfy baggy black jumper and sweatpants. That was all her wardrobe consisted of. She would get tea and toast and go back to her room. At 5am she would count the items she had used and hide them in the vent behind her bed. She still wasn't used to her items not going missing. When the birds started chirping she knew it was time to go back to bed.

After some time she started to venture downstairs to sneak an orange or hunt for some flowers to put in her room, but she never left the house. She never opened the door if she knew her gran was awake. She was still not convinced she wouldn't hurt her. She knew somehow she would make her angry so she avoided her like the plague. She took a towel with her to drape over the mirror in the hallway and collect it again on the way up. She never looked at the mirror. She felt bad enough without that adding to it. She stayed like this for a while, she can’t remember how long exactly just that all of a sudden things started to change.

Her grandmother started coming into her room and picking things up. She would say the odd word or two but mostly “glad your up”. She stalked her with her eyes but she stood like a statue until the door closed behind her. She would rush to collect her things, count them and hide them back in the vent. She would wake up at 2am and weird things would be left on her bed. Clothes or food, books, paper and pens. She didn't know if she could keep them so she would leave them by the door where she left her food trays, but her gran never took them back, just left more items.

When she overslept on those rare occasions her body allowed it she would wake to her grandmother sitting on her bed. She would smile and say “every second counts” tap her pocket watch and wait for a moment before leaving. She was probably waiting for a reply but she had nothing to say. What can you say to that? Every minute matters? What's the point? She knew she wasn't in a rush to do anything at all. Time passed and she started waking in the day more. She had to start leaving her room or make the choice to pee in a vase. She didn't want to sit staring at her own pee all day, so she had to start running to the bathroom. It was like playing the generation games. She would time herself and each time try to be faster. Her gran must have got suspicious because one day she appeared outside the bathroom. She said something really odd.

“Take your time do not fear.

Sadly I am never clear.

My answer stares you in the face.

Read me over and over just in case.

My answer may cause you pain.

But a smile you might gain.

Today I am like a July evening dream.

To solve me you may need a team.

What am i”?

She didn't reply, she just stopped feeling puzzled. Her grandmother laughed and said “when you figure it out come and find me”. She went back to her room and wrote it down. Hours passed and her alarm went off. 2am again. She turned the alarm off and changed it to 9am. She thought that would be long enough to solve it, but the alarm went off and she was still sitting at the desk puzzled. Her gran came in as she did every morning to drop off her trey. This time she didn't hide or panic. she looked at her grandmother in wonder. who are you? she thought. her gran left and she went back to her sheet of paper. a scream......no some sort of game.....no yes! thats it! she had it. she ran downstairs and found her gran in the kitchen drinking coffee. she shouted out "i am a riddle". that was the turning point.