PROLOGUE
Friday wasn't a sunny like the weather report said it would be. In fact, it was cloudy and overcast. The kind of slushy, gray atmosphere that makes a person want to stay in bed all day and watch bad movies. The kind of day best suited to family board games and daydreams.
Unfortunately, Ainsley did not own any board games and it had been months since she had dreamt of anything more than simple peace of non-existence. When she woke up that particular Friday, her mind was already set to a course that she viewed as inevitable. From her downstairs bedroom, she looked out the window and saw that God had not answered her prayers yet again. She wasn't too disappointed, because she felt that even for her, counting on mystical forces to interfere was a bit of a stretch. She went to the bathroom and took her pajama bottoms and tee shirt off. She stepped on the digital scale. 150 lbs. Ainsley had been fervently dieting, and yet, she was still fat. Incredible. Nothing was right lately. Nothing, she felt, had ever been truly right.
Ainsley went upstairs, opened the medicine cabinet, poured out the contents of several large-sized economy bottles of pain killer, filled a yellow plastic cup with lukewarm water and ended her life. As Ainsley died, she wondered who would take care of her cat. She lay stomach up on the kitchen floor, her eyes fixed on the cat's pink plastic food dish untill her the muscles could focus no longer.
She thought nothing of the life she was leaving behind. Not even for one moment, were there any regrets. It had become impossible for her to live in such a world of overwhelming emotion. She no longer slept, for fear of the nightmares that consumed her unconsciousness. Every emotion hit her like a brick wall. There was no rhyme or reason to her moodswings. Depression one moment, happiness the next. Her parents asked her over and over again what was wrong, what could they do to help. They begged her to give them answers, but she had no answers to give. She only understood one thing. Something about the way she percieved the world had changed irreversibly. And it seemed there was nothing she could do about it. Because Anisley could no longer control the life she was living, she ended all life instead. And for the most part, the dying itself was a quiet ordeal. However, when her stomach acid rebelled painfully and she began to vomit up clumps of digested food and blood, she wondered if maybe she had made a mistake taking all those pills. A gun would have been much quicker.