Afterglow

frigid

You'd think nothing would be worse than finding out your boyfriend cheated on you with your sister.  

You'd have thought wrong. 

It was returning back home with your tail tucked between your legs after thinking you'd finally escaped their world of toxicity and fake smiles with money dripping between their teeth and insults swimming in champagne gilded breaths. 

Stuck stranded outside of the airport whilst consequently freezing my ass off as the sky spit bitter, smog catching snow, I shivered in contempt waiting for the car that my dad had ordered to arrive, just to take me to the one place I absolutely dreaded returning.  

When said car finally did arrive, I sought shelter in its warm interior, uncaring if I trudged in muddy snow sludge from the outside.

It was in the sleek black town car that I slipped my headphones in once giving directions to the driver and escaped to my own world of a shuffled playlist that always seemed to drown out the monotony and harshness of the regular world, but I could still hear my words hanging in the air, like a promise and a curse all at once. 

"The address is twelve hundred Laymon Lane, Bayfield Academy."

I shivered as the words passed my lips.

Soggy, half-melted snowflakes drifted down the window of the town car in a lazy, lingering path that matched the pace at which I wished to return to the one place that I'd ever called home. 

One long year and still those ice capped skyscrapers that stood like gallant knights in the distance brought with them the promise of heartache and still born memories threatening to break through the walls that I had pulled high in my mind the moment I got out.

I blocked out the screeching horns and squealing brakes from the constant traffic around the small car that was chauffeuring me back to my own personal hell, tuning back into my music.  

A blessed distraction and salvation all in one, I survived on a diet of scintillating guitar riffs, haunting vocal runs and chilling lyrics that filled the space in my mind where all of my family drama, among other things, should have resided.

After my sister pretty much stole my boyfriend, I gouged myself on a litany of slow and painful ballads that could make even the hardest criminal shed a tear.  

When my parents split and I decided to go and live with my father in California, thousands of miles away from the only home I'd ever known, I had tormented my eardrums with raging punk rock that had me drumming my fingers to the beat long after the songs had ceased playing.

Today, though, the music failed to soothe my aching nerves. 

Today was the day that I would stroll back through those large marbled doors into the foyer and smell the Chanel perfume wafting off of my mother's fake chest in droves as if she were trying to hide the facade of happiness with it, somehow trying to make everything seem perfect and beautiful when our lives were anything but. 

It was easier to face my father after I'd stumbled across their well kept family secret, as he was always too busy doting on my new stepmother Ellen and her growing belly to notice anything suspicious about me and my behavior, but my mother was far more observant.  

Before I chose to live with my father she would breathe down my neck at any chance she got.

We were a split apart family, with one daughter so burned she decided to live across the country rather than face the toxicity, and the other so jaded she just so happened to steal the other's first real boyfriend.  

I sighed as I realized the problems I was bringing home with me far outshone and eclipsed the ones I had left home with.

The song switched over and a sigh of relief fell from my parted lips, my mind imagining the cloud of fog that I would have produced had the window been opened to allow the chilly new winter air inside.