Thanks for the positive reviews in the last chapter! Also, sorry about the spelling mistake towards the end. I always change a few minor details before a final upload, and it just so happened that I made a spelling mistake. ;) Let's hope I don't make another anytime soon. (I know now that I most certainly will. lol.)

Please leave me a review of this chapter, if you want to. I've decided that this chapter will also be in first person narrative, but am still undecided about the rest of the fic. It just depends on what you guys think. I've heard some people wanting third person narrative, but none requesting this style. All the same, I may continue with it simply because that's how I started. ;)

Please enjoy!

My first memory- the one that haunts me to this day- lives on, burned like a stamped scar in the black hole of my mind.

As carefree as a lilac dancing through the breeze, I twirl shamelessly beside a crystalline sapphire pond. My honeysuckle taffeta skirt billows beneath me, like waves flowing from the kiss of porcelain skin. A sticky coating of leftover candy coats my cherry lips as I sing into the wind, a melody of enchanting whispers, oblivious of what is to come. I am three.

My brother, sullen and serious at five, scowls at my delighted nonchalance. Looking back, I know he would give anything to be as blithe as we once were, but we cannot take back the past.

"Monica," he groans, looking up from his cardboard dinosaur book. "Can't you dance somewhere else?"

I laugh, and do my pirouettes closer to him, floating dangerously near the edge of the pond. "No," I chant. "No, no, no. No, no, no."

"Mommy," he calls out. "Monica is bothering me again."

My mother, looking lively and lean with something she lacks now, a spirit, simply shakes her head and laughs, pretending to scold me. Though I am now the 'favorite', if that's what you can call my relationship to my parents, Ross was the first 'miracle child', and that transcended my needs. Then.

"Mommy, Monica is bothering me again!" I sqeal in delight as he tries to brandish me with his book, but misplace my small pink feet and tumble down the hill into the pond.

The next thing I remember is waking up. Though I sometimes claim not to remember those five minutes in between, they haunt me to this day.

"We almost lost you," my mother sobs beside the lush green trees. "I almost lost my baby."

Hand in hand, my parents leaned on one another as I, their new miracle daughter, returned seemingly unharmed to the free spirited dance.

Little did they know, little did any of us know, that wouldn't be the last time my parents almost lost their baby.

Even if we wanted to, we couldn't go back and not take the days lacking worry for granted.

We are simply never happy in our own skin, never embracing the mistakes we are, never accepting the fact that truly, we are all misshapen particles, fighting through a storm of grief and sickness, trying to find our way.

-

"Monica," my mother pleads, her words bleeding with a newfound sincerity. "Won't you take off your headphones and look at the ocean?" Her eyes, a mirror image of my own, beseech me to listen for once. I've never been the poster child for anything, but I have to admit that she tries. "It's beautiful," she urges for an added measure.

I sigh and remove my headphones. My music, my solace, the remedial words of Led Zeppelin, will have to wait. Outside, the waters roar and the fine dark hairs on my arms prickle in a dance of fear and reminder. It's beautiful, in a terrifying way, I think. The blue hollow never seems to end, and this scares me more than anything. Everything on Earth seems to have an end, a place where it just ceases to exist, but not the ocean. It is infinite and engulfs us all whether we are aware of it or not.

For as long as I can remember, there has always been an end in sight, a defining moment when all of the sudden, I will be no more.

-

As a thin layer of twilight begins to paint the oceanic sky in a mile of iridescent turquoises and emeralds, our station wagon hums into the familiar worn spot on the driveway of our summerhouse.

It is my fifteenth summer, and the tenth time I can remember pulling into the gravel-worn driveway, so contrasting from the silken sand merely twenty feet away.

My dark hair, a thin curtain for the lie I have crafted around myself, hides me from the world. I breathe in slowly, feigning sleep.

"Jack," my mother, Judy, whispers. "Should we carry her inside?"

My eyelashes flutter against my face, and the effect somehow reminds me of a thousand spiders dancing in the filtered moonlight. I can imagine him pursing his lips in thought, crinkling the part of his forehead where his skin meets the defining edges of wiry gray.

"Judy, don't you think she's a bit old for us to treat her like this?" His voice rumbles softly, tantamount to the impact of the ocean's waves, and perhaps stronger.

"You know as well as I do that…"

And she doesn't say it. Somehow, I don't know what possessed my mother to hold back her words and drink them in a bitter cocktail of her own agony.

"Hey, princess," my father combs the hair from my face and I can feel him unbuckling the seatbelt from around me. He lifts me from the seat and I can feel my mother watching, swifter than a hawk.

For a moment, I consider holding my breath until I choked a silver shade of blue; perhaps she would believe the worst had finally happened. But then I think of the times we were almost torn apart, and they play barely more than an old TV show rerun, a mere warning of what could come.

"Dad," I breathe, opening my eyes to the world around me. "I'm awake. I can walk."

He smiles at my mother, a slight hint that either their marriage is further deteriorating or finally being sewed up. I can no longer detect their moods from their plastered smiles, and it hurts me to think that I was the one that ripped out the seams.

"Mom," Ross mutters from the backseat. "I'm going to go to the boardwalk." He grabs his weatherworn keyboard and nods to me as he leaves. Lately, he's been careful to say goodbye to me because he never knows if it will be the last time.

Ross is almost seventeen, and he does as he pleases. I wouldn't go as far to coin him a rebel, but he certainly tries to be one. Unfortunately -or fortunately, but it depends on how you look at it- my parents don't watch over him as much as they should. The summers are especially difficult because we get almost full reign of the small seashore town; it barely stretches three miles.

Actually, he gets the freedom of doing as he pleases. I, on the other hand, get the freedom of doing as my parents please.

"Mom," I test her after I am done unpacking my belongings in my usual pale yellow room. "Can I go for a walk along the ocean?"

Her brow furrows, and I can tell that she is waiting for my father to return from the car for a definite answer. In her eyes, I can see constant worry, and I'm sure that mine cast the exact same shadow.

"I promise to be back in an hour, and I'll be careful."

Finally, she gives in. "All right. If you're not back in an hour, I'm sending out the search parties." She hands me an oversized straw hat. "Wear this. It's getting colder. Be careful."

I head towards the door, surprised that they are extending my virtual leash. "I will."

The handle is almost warm in my hand when I hear her voice again, both wishing and urgent at the same time, a mass of emotion choked back in her throat. "And Monica?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't go in."

The screen door shuts lightly behind me as my bare feet pat the sand around me. I melt into the darkness, pulling the hat tighter to my face. A lone figure stands several sandcastles away, watching the intimidating tide lap against my feet. For some reason he doesn't scare me, unlike the rest of this world does.

My mother's words resound in my ears: "Don't go in." Of course she was referring to the ocean, and it doesn't hit me until I am in bed that night, a stick figure hovering under poorly drawn hoards of woolen blankets. I never answered her.

Yet I didn't even need to. This unspoken act between us has been going on for years, a sort of hieroglyphic mother-daughter language that has weathered barriers we never should have been forced to cross. She always warns me never to go in the ocean, and she has no need. No matter the amount of fear she tries tobury in my chest, a part of her will always know.

I will never go in.

-

Shall I continue? Do you like it? Love it? Hate it? Did you even read it? lol. Well, anyways, any pointers or types of reviews are welcome.

It's weird right now, but Monica and Chandler will be meeting very soon, and things will get better. ;) And remember, never assume about the characters. lol.

I hope everyone is having a great weekend!

Mel