Carrie

With tight shoulders and a broken heart, Carrie sat staring at her blank computer screen, willing the words to write themselves. Outside the merciless window before her, the sun didn't shine as bright as it had yesterday. But secretly, Carrie knew she couldn't blame the sun for its dimness.

Sunny or not, she'd still give her right hand to be out there.

Her coffee tasted too sweet, even while the bitterness beneath the sugar was poorly disguised. Earlier, Carrie had tried drinking it black, like so many of her heroes were keen to do. The result was a scalded tongue, a sense of rejection, and this lingering bitter quality lent to everything else that went into her mouth, including her words. She supposed she should be glad, then, that there was no one here to talk to.

Admittedly, she wasn't mortified when she looked in the mirror. In fact, occasionally she even felt pleased. Nonetheless, walking through the halls at her little closed-in school never failed to leave her self-conscious. And seeing people she knew together, always huddled in small groups, always left her feeling lonely. And the terrible self-pity didn't ebb at all when she realized that she herself either systematically avoided, or else narrowly escaped, each of those groups during their formation several weeks ago.

Something about independence? Off-timing? An impulse to check everyone out before immediately attaching herself to whoever accidentally sat closest to her, during those first, befuddled days of courses? Whatever her reasoning at the time, now any such precautions appeared cowardly, as well as unforgivably arrogant to her loner's eyes. She told herself she needed to learn how to cling, at least a little, to complete strangers if she had any hope of befriending them. That's how it worked, in times of (love and) war.

Returning her ADD-childish mind to the task at hand, she once again cleared her head of pathos and stared blankly at the screen. This time, she readied her fingers in the proper ASDF JKL; positions, just in case inspiration suddenly needed a place to chill. Still waiting, when she glanced up at the window she saw that it was raining.