Janice

What is it that made her look out the window on such a gray day? She felt suddenly inspired by the lack of sun, an inspiration that brought on depression and discouragement and the lack of something to live for on that particular day.

The house was quiet and the wooden floor cold; time did seem to go on beyond the rain-soaked windowpanes where her life stopped and stared out sullenly, hoping for a change of mind from the uppermen.

She didn't have anywhere to go but she walked because she couldn't do more. All the books had been read and the pages had been written in. Her room was not the same shade of blue.

After all this time perhaps her mother had been right about it all. Had she not relied so much on a disposable boy she would not be trapped like a rat. She had made him into a Buddha, a marble statue of a man and idolized both his blessings and his wrongs like a bat, blind and senseless. In the end, she could have been giving love to a stranger. It wasn't until he cut the cords of the cardboard cloud that were holding her up that she realized the scum he was.

Now she could spit on his pictures and silently sob, though the name and voice that went along with it still played in the back of her head like a broken record.

If only she had known this would happen, she would have never left her friends on the side like the stale complementary bread on restaurants (the one you never take), or the garnishing lettuce that was only there for looks (genetically modified for your aesthetic convenience) but was never eaten (were her friends there just to be later thrown away? what a cruel fate, my lettucy girls!).

The worst part, she thought as she swallowed a whole 10 pills, was not that she had lost all contact with the outside world, that she had become a 97-pound wilting little figurette, that she felt she could no longer trust anyone and that her heart had been broken to no end and left unable to love again...The worst thing was that she would never, ever be able to enjoy a rainy day again as she used to when she was a lively, love-filled, hopeful girl.