A/N: Hey everybody! I decided since I am working on Ruled By the Senses, and I'm having a major writer's block on it, that I'd start a new story. I'm writing in the first person, and I've never written that way before, so I apologize if I screw up verb tenses or anything. I hope you enjoy it.

God hates me.

I crawled between the cool satin sheets and snuggled down into the mountain of pillows on my bed. Another day of failure settled right behind my temporal lobe to hammer disappointment into my brain. My father's voice ringing in my ears and intensifying the headache.

All I wanted to do was crawl inside one of my books and live there instead of this life I was given. Who was it that said anything you wanted is possible? Whoever it was didn't know the meaning of the word fail.

I've been out of work for two weeks and can't find anywhere that's hiring. I live with a roommate in our tiny apartment with her huge dog and a cat that keeps bringing in dead rodents. That isn't the worst part. My roommate is a complete and utter slob and it scares me to step outside my room. Why don't I clean it? Mainly because I'm always gone and don't have time when I come home at night to do so. That and because the idea of what I might find scares me.

Now, mind you I'm no milk-and-water miss (after all, I'm a girl auto tech student) but when it comes to grossness, I can only handle so much when I'm the one cleaning it. So I basically stick to my room and eat meals at my best friend's house. She's off at college and her mom is having empty nest syndrome, so it all works out.

Tomorrow was Saturday, and if it was nice, I was going to take a jog along the lake on the bike path. After I stopped playing rugby in college, jogging was the only thing that I did to keep in shape.

A Nora Roberts novel found its way into my restless hands and I opened up to where I had stopped last. Irish music was being played in a pub, people laughing and romance in the air. I could almost hear it all and it made my heart ache.

About three chapters in, I started to doze and in that suspended time between wakefulness and sleep, I felt the book slip out of my hands; heard it land with a soft thump on the floor. The peeper frogs outside were silent tonight, heralding the changing of summer to autumn. Then the world became indistinct, the blackness of sleep prevailing.

I woke groggy the next morning to the annoying buzz of my alarm. The urge to skip my jog was strong, but I – being a creature of habit and routine – got up and dressed before I decided differently. It isn't that I don't like change, I just like having something constant when everything else was sucked into a vortex of chaos. And right now, my life is the very definition of chaos.

Stretching by the beach, and using a bench as my balance, I got the inexplicable urge to dive into the frigid water. Shaking off my wayward thoughts, I loped off in a gentle but quick pace and immediately lost myself to the process.

One, two, three. Left, left, breathe, breathe.

Controlling my body in a run was one of the few things I found I could master. Timing the breathing and amount of breath so as not to become winded was actually harder than I had originally thought, but eventually I got it and my endurance and stamina instantly improved.

I rounded the corner by a huge oak tree that had leaves the color of topaz, and instantly found that the world had dropped out from under me. I was falling through a black hole and all I could think of was Alice in Wonderland.

I landed hard, hitting my head, and as I passed into unconsciousness, I realized I couldn't hear the sound of waves anymore.