The dreary winter evening alleviated her saddened mood very little, with the heavy rain soaking right through her clothes and dripping down her face. It was icy cold against the skin, plastering her bleached hair to her face, and chilling her right to the bone.
It was perfect for inducing a cold, but there Heather Mason was meandering aimlessly straight through it, passing through the crowd in her own little world, acting as if the people around her were not there at all.
Heather, or should she say Cheryl, couldn't have cared less. Her father's death; her departure from Silent Hill. She'd felt nothing but emptiness ever since. It was like she'd lost something that she couldn't get back. However, it wasn't just her dear father, but something else that she felt had left her. A piece of herself, perhaps, snapped right off of her soul and tossed aside in the very town she'd come to loathe with an intense passion.
She
pressed herself against the brickwork of one of the many buildings
she happened to be passing. They all looked the same to her. The same
colours and shapes; none of them of any great importance to her. They
were simply there.
She looked up to the darkened sky, letting the
rain splash against her face. Hoping that perhaps the water would
awaken her to some sort of reality that she knew had existed once in
her lifetime. That was no longer there.
What she wouldn't give to have it back again. Her father and herself. Happy. Sitting on opposite ends of that kitchen table in their homely little apartment. Her father conveying ideas for stories that would never be expressed on paper; that would never really have the chance to be seen by the world, like they deserved to be. Cheryl, with her hands around a plain blue mug of hot coffee, listening to the same old ideas as if they'd never been told to her before; a smile on her face and her math homework pushed to the side, never to be completed. It would be forgotten until the next morning, and she'd get pulled up on the matter; given detention or extra homework and Cheryl would just grin, listening half-heartedly to the lecture about responsibilities.
Hey, it was worth it, wasn't it? She valued that time spent with her father more than anything in the world. She valued them more than maths homework, especially.
Those evenings were lost now. They were all chapters in an earlier novel. A novel she had to put down, to start for the next one. Perhaps her feelings of emptiness would gradually fade. Those feelings made her feel so ill. So lost. She'd lost more than the obvious, and she could feel it weighing her down. Perhaps she'd be fated to feel like that until her very own death.
She didn't want that emptiness anymore. She wanted to be happy. She wanted it all back.