Chapter 2

Amy woke up some time around 3am. Damned insomnia.

A single strand of light from a street lamp outside had creeped through the foggy glass of the window beside her door. It shone weakly on her tiles. While everything else was pitch-black, the lamp allowed Amy to see the mess she had created.

It barely fazed her. The only thing she was concerned about was the fact that in her current more rational state of mind, she wasn't going to get back to sleep easily while the entryway was in such disarray.

I sighed and stumbled up to my feet, going through the motions. It wasn't as if this was the first time this had happened to her. Amy had had such practice with cleaning up her own blood that she knew all the right products to use, all the right methods and motions to practice.

Amy wiped at the tiles, only barely aware of her actions. She was in another one of her a zombie-like states. No matter how much she hurt myself and how good and relieving the pain felt, whenever she stopped, she was back to pure numbness. Amy thought too much and felt too little.

After the tile were mopped and the mop head was rinsed and air-drying, the obsessive compulsive part of Amy took control. It started out small, just like always—the picture frames weren't levelled, the drawers on the bench next to the door weren't pushed in properly, the ornaments weren't placed in their correct spots. The next thing she knew, it was 8am and the kitchen had been deep-cleaned to perfection, the doorknobs had been polished, and the bookshelves and DVD cabinets had been re-organised no less than three times—this time by alphabetical titles, compared to the previous arrangements of genre and colour.

Realising the time, Amy somehow snapped herself out of this robotic state. After all the cleaning products and equipment had been stored away, she ended up on the shower floor with hot water pounding on her back. She couldn't bring herself to get up and turn the temperature down, so she left it at the scalding heat it was. The warmth felt nice, though, despite its capability of giving her first-degree burns.

Finally deciding that she had been in the shower for far too long, Amy reluctantly rose and turned off the tap. She wrapped the thickest towel she could find around herself. All the towels that Amy owned were a charcoal grey—she had given up on white linen a long time ago.

Amy stood in front of her mirror and stared at herself. Her hair now only fell to her shoulders. She had grown tired of maintaining it, and in the midst of a breakdown that was a hybrid of a panic attack and an existential crisis a few weeks ago, had chopped it off at the shoulders. When she went to the salon to fix her poor job—in an effort to even it out, they had to trim it so it now hung just below her chin—Amy had them dye her locks a deep, dark purple. It was honestly essentially a black, however it shone purple in the right lighting. The natural ginger shade from her past reminded her of him, always affectionately teasing her about the fire growing on her head.

She liked the thicker towels because they hid all the parts of her body that she deemed inadequate. To Amy, they hid the way her chest was too small, and the way her stomach was too big. They hid all the visible parts of herself that screamed failure! at every part of her being.

When she had towelled herself off and gotten dressed again, Amy made her way to the kitchen to start the kettle. There was no way she was getting back to bed for a quick nap now, and she knew from an abundance of experience that it was much better to do something productive rather than lie in bed for hours, waiting for the freedom of sleep.

In Amy's point of view, a cup of tea almost always helped make life seem liveable. Almost. She considered herself a tea snob, enjoying only small selection of teas, but for when she was in different moods. Iced peach tea was for when she had an enormous amount of work and was procrastinating. Lemon and ginger was for in the morning, to wake herself up. Peppermint tea was for whenever she was stressed or anxious, which seemed to be all the time, these days. She guessed it was safe to say that she drank an enormous amount of peppermint tea.

Amy full-well knew that she was actively ignoring the problem at hand. It probably wasn't the healthiest thing to do, but she decided to put off dealing with it until she actually had to confront it. Which would, she figured as she looked at the microwave clock, be in just over 5 hours.

Well, crap.

Rip it's so short, but I really don't care. That just felt like the best place to end this chapter. Also, I've spent the last hour rewriting this in third-person POV, so.

I was thinking of maybe doing next chapter from Matt's perspective? And by Matt, I mean John Smith, of course. WhOOps.

Goodnight. x