Beacon Hills. It was a supposedly quiet town. Everyone had their own private lives and when our car pulled up in front of the quiet little house surrounded by forest with a SOLD sign out front, I was hoping mine would begin soon.

When I was 12 years old, My mother was diagnosed with Fatal Familial Insomnia. It's a disease that is genetically passed on from the parent to the child. There was a 50% chance that I would have this disease when I was born, and when my mom was diagnosed they tested me as well. A year later she died and my dad and I were left to pick up the pieces of what was left of our shattered lives. But the worst part of it all wasn't that I had lost my mom. In her final months she wasn't the woman I knew all my life and she had become bitter and mean and scared. The worst part was after her passing. I was numb. I didn't shed a tear as the men in black suits picked her up off the floor in the bathroom. The blood was hard to clean but I spent hours doing so. When the funeral came around I had already turned 14 and the softly voiced apologies and condolences never really seemed all that heartfelt. But the absolute worst part, was watching my dad walk on eggshells around me. He would give me the world anyway, but it was like he went out of the way to make me feel loved and protected. It was beginning to stifle me. But I had a limited amount of time left. I wasn't going to deny him his daughter's time, especially when we had no idea how much was left.

So, we moved to Beacon Hills. He thought that a change of scenery would do us good. I agreed. I was tired of everyone I knew looking at me like I was a fragile little china doll about to break when the wind blew. He moved us thinking that a new school and a new life would be a good way to forget everything that had happened.

Now I'm 17 and I'm unpacking boxes from the moving truck in front of our new house. It's bigger than our last one, but only a little. It was a 2 bedroom farmhouse with a big front yard with a wraparound porch and a screen door. The front door was white with a crystal cut glass window. I opened it and the sunlight filtered through, casting rainbows on the ground. I stopped, setting down the box I was carrying and ran back to the car to pull my camera from my backpack. I lowered myself down onto the wooden floorboards of the deck and started snapping different angles. One of the pictures looked like the rainbows were in the shape of an hourglass. It was my favorite. I'd get the pictures uploaded on my laptop tonight and decide if they needed any editing then. My dad walked through the door way smiling to himself in that way he had. We had a shared love of photography. There was just something about seeing the perfect image that we were both intrigued with. Plus I had a small following on deviantart and photo bucket that was asking for the next update.

This was a clean start. No more pitying stares from my friends and people who knew of our misfortune. No more people telling me I should be more worried about the time I have left. And no one poking into my business about my disease. I took a deep breath of the fresh air all around me and let the scent of the pine trees soak into my very soul. I would remember this. No matter what comes in the future, even after death I would remember this moment. That feeling of being free. The feeling that I hadn't felt since before mom had been taken away from me, before I was told I would suffer the same fate, and before I was reminded of my death sentence by every pair of eyes that looked at me.