Darkness fell that night the way it had every night that summer. The brisk cool air replacing the hot humidity as it whispered through the amiable trees. The weeping willows were her favorite and always had been. But on this night even the tallest, most beautiful willow tree could not bring that once known hint-of-a-smile to her face. She looked to the trees and saw only darkness. Darkness that invaded the air around her, stealing the last remains of the colorful sunset and beseeching her to the sorrows of the day that had ended in their passing.
It had been a day filled will loss. Loss was something she had known well from the remaints of her earliest memories and through the ever changing years since that time. Loss is something that once felt can never quite be mended, never quite be overcome. All those around her presumed she would always know loss. They looked upon her with the onset of the greatest pity they could bring themselves to feel without violating the impertinent happiness of their everyday lives. Ignorance is bliss. This was a phrase her mother had whispered to her in passing when she was but a child.
In her mind there were none around her. She saw no one. She spoke to no one. And no one spoke to her. It had been several years since she had heard her name spoken aloud. She could hardly remember her true name anymore. It was as though her name had drifted away with the light nightly breeze or had perhaps been caught in the tides of the ever changing ocean currants. If she heard it now it would pass through her with only the impact of perhaps the name of a childhood friend long since forgotten that was then whispered in a crowd or read from a book. Each day to her was a lifetime. She felt nothing. Nothing but perhaps the breeze of that chilly night and the sorrow it brought her.
What she lost that day or those years ago truly matters not. It matters not to the world around her. Not to the people who claim to have known her and not to those she had never to meet. Her loss mattered only to her. And in her it lived with an undying passion and a never-ending fear. She can not tell of her story because to tell there must be someone to listen and she had no one. But hers, as others like hers is a story that must be heard. So many in this world die in silence. Their impact is made but not acknowledged. Their hopes and their fears are lost. Lost in the ever changing circles of life. We live, we eat, we sleep, we die. A life unacknowledged is like a tear that falls from a flooded eye sofly down the old and wrinkled cheek of another never to be wiped away. The substance of the person will soon fade but forever there will be remains of the life left unlived like a salt-water path left uncleansed from a stone cold body. A constant reminder. Her story may not be one well known and it may not be one of particular length or inspiration, but it is the story of a life that will forever lie in the breeze of those sandy beaches at nightfall. When she dies may her story live on forever like the footprints in the sand of an abandoned lakes shore.

Meredith Berkely came into the world on Spetember 7, 1988. She arrived just as the sun was setting over the water through the window of the small ocean-shore hospital in California. She arrived graciously in the arms of her sixteen year old mother and her rather frazzled seventeen year old father. She had been a mistake, an accident if you will, but she was the most beautiful and wonderful mistake that Kathleen Toriet and Johnathan Berkely would ever make in their lives. Rosy cheeked and barely 7 lbs. Meredith's mother exclaimed that she was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Johnny could barely keep his feet from falling from underneath him but as he looked at his newborn baby he let out a wonderous sigh that would forever be remembered by the only nurse on duty that night, Miss Abigail Bennet. Neither parent knew the sorrow to come. Only thoughts of joy filled their crowded minds and flooded hearts.
Three months later Kathleen and Johnny married in the small block in town and looked forward to beginning their lives with their beautiful child. They bought a house near Kathleen's parents and began their lives.

Unfinished. Possibly never to be completed.