Sam never wanted to end up the way she did. She always did what her parents told her as a child, never fussed or cried. She was smart, always looking around and trying to figure things out. She was artistic, a good strong voice and an affinity for sketching, and could write like no one else. Most of all, she always smiled. Everyone around her felt immediately better when they saw her happy face and glowing eyes.

As Sam grew older, people began to confide secrets in her (she just had that trustworthy look about her). She was the first to know when someone’s parents got a divorce, if a pet had died, if someone was grounded. Everyone loved her.

All this before she was eleven years old.

When she turned twelve, though, and moved on into seventh grade, she realized that life wasn’t just a bowl of cherries. She found herself wanting to rebel against the parents that she had loved and had nurtured her since birth. Her friends all began to drift apart and change. Sam’s very best friend became her worst enemy, talking behind Sam’s back without a second glance.

Sam had never known much about the world outside her happy existence. She didn’t know that friends could become strangers in the space of a month. She didn’t know that bullies could drive kids to madness. The world was just a big ball of dirt back then, before she was thrust into awareness by the sudden outbreak of war on the other side of the earth. She finally heard about global unrest.

And she stopped smiling.

Sam still listened to everyone’s problems, giving out the occasional bit of advice when she could. She saw the joy in that person’s eyes and it made her glad. She was making a difference, she could mean something to the world.

But her life began to fall to pieces during the cold wet winter. Her father was working hours to the south, so he could only be seen on weekends. Her mother became bitter, always complaining about something or another. Sam’s mom had no one else to talk to, so she confided in her daughter.

Sam listened, as she always did, but it just made her sadder. The woman whom she had idolized for her entire life was falling, and dragging Sam along with her.

At school, Sam learned about foul language. She figured out that she could express her anger and disappointment through these words, as long as it wasn’t in front of her mom. She learned that the hard way, and had the taste of soap in her mouth for a week.

Her eyes lost their sparkle.

As winter slowed into spring, the mood did not improve. Sam’s mom yelled at her dad for leaving them alone all winter. Her dad yelled at her mom, saying that he provided all the money in the house. Sam sat on her bed and wrote poems about happier days.

Nothing changed, no matter how long Sam waited. Her once proud straight back bent in sorrow as her parent’s fighting grew worse. They always did it in the middle of everything, right in front of her. Sam turned inwards and a lump of anger grew in her chest, fueled by the constant pain of being helpless in her parents troubles.

She couldn’t help her friends either. One’s parents were fighting, just like Sam’s. Another was starving herself, and another was cutting. A few even left her entirely.

At night, Sam would sit alone in her room hearing the fighting below her. She wrote about the ache in her chest and how tired of it all she was.

School seemed to last forever those last couple of months. There was an even heavier workload then before, homework every night, a project every few days. Each morning, Sam would wake up at six o’clock, and keep her eyes closed, staring at the inside of her eyelids for those last few minutes of rest.

They were the only peace she could get.

Things steadily worsened. Sam would lay awake for hours before falling asleep, simply contemplating life and everything, stretching her weary mind to it’s limits. Even though it just made her more tired, the mental exercise kept her mind off of her everyday life.

But even those midnight excursions weren’t enough. Sam would sit on her bed, staring into space, not even hearing the angry words flying between her once happy parents. She never had a smile reach her eyes anymore, her face now old beyond her years.

One day, Sam came home from school to an empty house. Her mother was working late and her father was still down at his job. Sam sat alone, turned on some music, and closed her eyes.

She waited for something magical to happen, someone to come and whisk her away from her weary existence, but nothing came. No sudden three wishes, no relief.

Sam walked out to the kitchen and began to unload the dishwasher, not paying any attention to what she was doing. She suddenly gasped and grasped her hand. She looked down and realized that she had almost impaled it on a knife.

Sam stayed staring at it for a long moment, and then looked to her hand. Her gaze shifted back to the knife. She slowly picked it up and eyed it carefully. Light glinted off it’s wicked blade with malevolent flickers.

She gently laid the serrated edge against her wrist, shivering as the cold metal froze her skin. She cocked her head slightly, staring with wide eyes at the knife. She shifted her head to the other side, weighing her options and pressing slightly harder on the handle.

Blinking quizzically, she lifted the knife and held her wrist up to her eyes. Tiny depressions were etched in the soft skin, some filling slowly with bright red blood. Her eyes widened again and she quickly tore a paper towel off the roll and pressed it to her wrist. The bleeding stopped and she let out a breath.

That night, she began to write about death.

Sam’s birthday came and went without much fanfare or fireworks, more of a dull sigh. She was officially a teenager, though, and she took heart in that. Teens were supposed to feel like this, weren’t they? They were supposed to try and change, rebel, and think about suicide all the time.

But she slowly realized that that wasn’t true. Not all teens were infatuated with death, and her parents certainly didn’t want her to rebel. Every time she did, they would tie her in with ropes of rules and stake her to the ground with the word “grounded”. Sam was in shock when she first heard the word spoken to her. She had never been grounded before, never been able to fathom what the word meant.

At night, she would sit in her room and stare at the blank wall, wondering what would happen next.

The first part of eighth grade passed uneventfully. Her father’s job down south ended, so he could come home at night. But the year away had changed him. He did nothing around the house, which made Sam’s mother even angrier. Sam would retreat into herself every time their voices would raise, staring at the two with a blank, unemotional expression on her face, fists starting to clench. All her concentration would focus in on keeping the fiery hate growing in her chest down to an ember as opposed to a wild fire.

Near Thanksgiving, Sam’s grandfather passed away. Her extended family was thrown into turmoil, while her world slowed. Sam felt as though she was standing in the middle of a busy city street, watching the others buzz around her and being unable to get out of their way. She felt ignored. No one asked her about how she felt anymore.

Her next poems were of being left behind, forgotten and alone.

At Christmas, Sam was given an acoustic guitar. She couldn’t figure out how to play a chord, so she started to pick out the individual notes until she could play entire songs. Sam would sing along in a high, clear voice, tears streaming down her face in tiny waterfalls.

One of her friends gave her a mixed CD, full of songs Sam had never heard before. They were all different, each with a separate flavor of tone and feeling. When she asked what kind of music it was, her friend only smiled and said “emo rock”.

Sam became obsessed with emo. She listened to every group she could get her hands on, every band whose words sang to her very soul. For the first time in more than a year, Sam felt as though someone understood, that someone else knew what she was going through. She didn’t feel so alone anymore.

Sam got a boyfriend, or, rather, a friend that was a boy. He was sweet, but the two of them never went anywhere or did anything. Sam felt herself grow apart from the boy and broke up with him. He didn’t understand any of how she was feeling, not like the bands, not like her poems.

Sam wrote of love, loss, and pain.

She now nurtured that ember in her heart. Sam began to realize that it was the only thing keeping her going. The constant pain and anger skated her through the times when she was too tired to function, and kept her from crying every night. Even though she tried to keep it warm and burning, the ember began to harden and cool.

One night, Sam snapped. She was sick of the fighting, sick of biting her tongue. Her mother and father had been fighting over whether or not Sam should be punished for missing her chores one week or not. Sam stood slowly. Her mother looked over and asked what she wanted.

Sam told her that she was sick of hearing the two fighting. She said that she just wanted a moment’s peace to calm down, where they could at least pretend to be a normal family.

Her mother’s face turned bright red. Her hand flashed out and caught Sam on the cheek before she knew what had happened. Sam’s eyes widened as she held a hand to the suddenly burning mark on her face. Tears filled her eyes, but she bit them back and met her mother’s hateful stare.

Her mother looked away first, muttering that she didn’t like the look in Sam’s eyes. Sam smiled inwardly. Each time she and her mother had a blow-up, she would stare with those eyes and her mother would look away. Sam had a weapon.

She would sit awake at night, only for a few minutes, for she was exhausted beyond mortal bounds. She always found time to open her poetry book and jot down a quick one about the slow transformation of her heart from fire to ice.

Sam could feel her heart chilling. The anger started to fade away, leaving a vast emptiness in it’s wake. She fell into a deep depression, where every other thought contained the word suicide. Her heart froze over and her eyes were always filled with mists.

Sam stopped writing poetry. It was too painful to even try.

Summer came, and Sam went to a three week long camp. Separated from the fights and worries, her heart began to thaw. She felt again, she smiled and it lit her face with happiness. She ceased listening to emo music as a religion and found hope again.

Then she came home and was jerked back to reality. Every other word she shared with her mother was in a loud tone, derogatory, too. She fell back into her music and taught herself the notes on her guitar, singing the lyrics with a lower voice, but still just as powerful as before. No tears came.

Her heart burned into a black cinder, on constant fire, just in time for school to start. With the entry into high school, the workload and expectations doubled twice over. Sam found herself floundering, falling into her bed at night and crawling to wake up in the morning. She thought about how her mother used to tell her about God, and looked to the heavens.

But all she found was silence.

Sam renounced Christianity, choosing to become an Atheist instead. Around this time, her poetry turned to the subject of death once more. Sam saw her world falling even further away from her, and wept at the loss. Her family was still fighting, her friends were still changing and flailing.

One afternoon, when no one was home, Sam went into her room and locked the door. She put on a loud rock CD and sat on her bed, staring at the wall and at something she had found in her parent’s room the day before.

It was a Swiss Army knife. Sam flicked out the blade and examined it carefully, sliding the blade along her thumb and cocking her head to the side. She lifted the blade to her eyes and stared long and hard. Sam then turned the inside of her arm towards the ceiling and brought the blade down in a graceful arc.

It scratched along her forearm, sending a shiver up Sam’s spine. She pressed lightly, only enough to make a faint mark. That was enough for now. She did it over and over again until all the pain in her heart had left, at least for the moment.

Sam flicked the blade closed and set it on her book shelf, staring at it for a long moment before looking at the mark on her arm. She regarded it with a question in her eyes.

Would anyone notice?

And would anyone care?

No one noticed. Sam did everything short of waving her now scarred arm in front of her parents’ eyes, but they were oblivious to her pain. She could no longer meet their eyes.

Sam finally discovered the joys of online blogging, placing one’s thoughts on the web where no one-or at least no one who you knew-could find them. But, amazingly, one of her closest friends happened upon it and actually read it. What Sam had been unable to say for so many years came pouring out in a daily torrent. Her friend would nod, reassure, and act the part of an indignant teen at the perfect times, just as Sam herself used to do.

But it wasn’t enough. She still felt as though her friend didn’t really get it, didn’t really understand exactly what was going on.

And then the unthinkable happened. Her mother found the blog. And Sam found that the wrath of a woman scorned is backed by the power of volcanoes. Sam found her face streaming with tears as her parents confronted her about everything she had written, yelling out the horrible things she had written about them and using them to lash her with fire. Sam finally caved and literally curled into the fetal position, refusing to answer any more of their questions.

She wrote a short piece for her blog explaining what had happened before deleting it forever.

Sam was cleaning her room one day when she found the Swiss Army Knife again. She opened it and stared mournfully before throwing it over her shoulder, hearing it snap closed behind her. She sank to the floor and sobbed. Not even pain could begin to help her now.

Time edged on. Winter shoved into Sam’s life, into her very soul, freezing the fire that had once kept her going and living, leaving her empty, barren, utterly alone. She wanted someone to notice that she was hurting inside, but her stubbornness wouldn’t let her tell. She pleaded within herself to tell someone what was going on, but no words could come out. But she became a good actor. Out of all of this, she had learned to mask the pain and play the part of the dutiful daughter, the diligent student, the perfect friend.

Only she wasn’t perfect enough. A few weeks after Christmas, Sam received a call from her sobbing friend. Turns out, her closest friend on earth, the one who had read her blog and at least tried to understand, had utterly given up. She had committed herself to the chill hands of death, via the barrel of a gun to the head. Sam’s world came crashing down around her. She suddenly felt as though the world had screeched apart and left her floating, alone, in the coldest, darkest reaches of space.

Sam fell to her knees upon hearing the news, tears streaming from her eyes. She dropped the phone, unheeding of her friend’s plaintive cries for emotional help. Her hands balled into fists and she looked to the heavens she had stopped believing in such a short time ago. “WHY?” she bellowed, hearing the word echo around her and leap from hill to hill, bounding into the distance. “WHY THE FUCKING HELL DID YOU HAVE TO TAKE HER, TOO?”

The pain cut into her, leaving a gaping wound far worse than any knife could hope to give. She screamed as it bled hot tears through her eyes and pulled her heart out with one devastating blow. Sam shrieked and began to run, unaware of herself or anything around her, only of the white-hot pain of whips slowly scarring her body, lashing her over and over with distrustful words and the sound of a gunshot.

Sam ran out of her house, down the streets, into the cold woods, without realizing she was barefoot, wearing pajama pants and a t-shirt. The cold winter wind smiled as it’s new child ran right into it’s waiting hands.

Sam ran until her mind floated back to her body, finally hearing the soft protests of ‘it’s too cold’ and ‘please turn back’ through the blaring super-nova agony. She fell to the snow-covered ground again, not bothering to stay out of it’s cold embrace, but curling up and shaking with frozen disbelief. She sobbed until the sounds became a racking cough, and then she laid silently, letting the sky cover her in a blanket of snow.

Sam felt her consciousness draining away, leaving a black void that beckoned for her to sleep. Beyond caring, she slowly consented and closed her eyes against the chill night. Before her breathing slowed, two tears leaked out, freezing on her cheeks as her shivering stopped. Sam’s heartbeat slowed down, and she was finally at peace.

Sam opens her eyes to the blaring white walls of a hospital and bustling nurses. One turns as she moans and smiles before rushing off in search of a doctor. Apparently, Sam fell asleep in very cold weather. She was very close to death before a fifteen year old boy had come across her while running away from home. Sam has to bite back a bitter laugh at the irony in that one.

So the battle appears to be over, though there are casualties. Sam feels that she no longer has a soul. Her closest friend, the one who introduced her to emo rock, the one who read her innermost thoughts, is dead. Her other pals are devastated by the death and Sam’s own apparent attempt at suicide. Her relationship with her parents is broken into shards to sharp to try and repair. And her life is still shot to hell.

But now, there is a ray of hope. Her careless action finally alerts those around her to the fact that Sam is not okay. Her parents begin the long process of rebuilding the trust between them, taking it slow. Sam is sent to a counselor, three times a week for however long it will take the wounds to heal. Her friends are becoming closer once more, finally realizing the pressure that has been on Sam for three long years.

Sam is slowly healing herself, too. She’s working at chipping the rime ice off her heart and thawing out her soul, trying to connect with people again, though never again on the level she once did. Sam is learning how to put her own wellbeing before those around her, which would normally be a bad thing, but it works out here. She also has a new friend, one who understands exactly what she means in her poems, and can hear the subtle lyrics between the lines of a song.

Yes, Sam has a boyfriend now. He is the boy who saved her life, in more than one way. He is giving her hope again, hope for her future, hope for life. He knows of everything that has befallen Sam, he is the only one besides the counselor that knows the entire story. But he would understand her reasons anyway. He lived through it too.

It will take a long time to rebuild, to sooth the still bleeding wounds rent upon Sam’s life and those around her. It will take much longer before Sam can forgive herself for everything she did, everything she didn’t do, everything that could have been. She may never be able to.

But Sam is no longer alone.

Sam will never be alone again.

And that’s the way it should be.