Mentions: @Mira Hawkins

Amber wasn’t herself. And she hadn’t been ever since her third year of school when this had all started. Ever since then Amber had been sort of isolated. The kind of person to walk into the room, know everyone there but decide to sit in the corner until her best friend Kaya joined her. No matter how much her friends urged her to join in in the fun group activities, to be her normal self again; she just couldn’t. How could she pretend things were normal when in reality they weren’t?
She didn’t know how Kaya did, hide all of the trauma from their third year deep inside and move on. The nightmares still haunted her. The troubles with her parents just made it worse. Her nightmares consisted of the massive creature lurking in the shadows of the forest hungry to eat Kaya, hungry to eat her its massive legs and huge body not march for either of them. One step slower and she would have been dead, chomped up into pieces and gods knows where she would be now. She contemplated that day every day, wondering, calculating, wishing she could do anything to stop. But the nightmares of that day never stopped. And wasn’t sure they would ever stop.
So her coping mechanism was drawing. Sometimes it would be the creepy monster, other times it was just the nature that surrounded her. She was a stranger person like that. She drew her nightmares but also her dreams. Today she was here to watch the sunrise at 7 in the morning and capture its beauty down on her canvas. While it was chilly, she did not mind. The cold never really had bothered her.
Her headphones were plugged in and she was so focused on capturing every little detail on her canvas with her paint brush so that she wouldn’t forget this beautiful moment, that she did not notice anything else. Not even someone else, another girl watching her, immersed in her canvas, capturing the beautiful morning sky, and trying to escape her terrible reality. One step slower and she would have been dead. The phrase repeated in her head. But when she was here, she was just a girl with her paintbrush. And nothing else.

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