A/N: Don't hurt me. I didn't mean to start something new, but this idea popped into my head, demanding to be written.

This isn't going to be a light, fluffy story. This story will be tackling the topics of depression and the loss of a loved one. COVID and the pandemic are mentioned in this chapter, but they will not be playing a part in the rest of the story. If these things are triggering for you, I wouldn't continue.

Writing this first chapter was very cathartic for me. A lot of what I've been feeling and going through the last few years is being poured into this story.

For anyone else that might be struggling with mental health, you're not alone.

This story is very inspired by the vibes of folklore. I've been very much in my Taylor Swift era recently. No pun intended.

Also, I mention Fontana Lake, which is a real body of water in North Carolina; however, it's location is in this story is fictional.

Happy reading.

1. This is Me Trying

I've been having a hard time adjusting
I had the shiniest wheels, now they're rusting
I didn't know if you'd care if I came back
I have a lot of regrets about that
- This is Me Trying, Taylor Swift

"Shit!" I exclaim as my foot gets submerged in a puddle. I let out a sound of frustration, looking at my phone again only to confirm that I still didn't have any cell service. It hadn't been the best day. In fact, I'd had nothing but bad days recently, which is how I found myself on a dark road in the middle of a rainstorm.

It started when my agent called me after she read the pages that I sent her of my new novel.

"Bella, these pages…"

"Are shit." I finished for her. "The pages are shit." I knew it before I even sent them to her. It had taken me weeks to write fifty pages. A few years ago, it would've taken me a day. Nothing about the story felt right. Then again, nothing I tried to write recently felt right anymore.

"They're not complete shit." Alice sighs on the other end of the phone. "There are aspects that are great. The main character's feelings of grief feel genuine, and they pack a punch."

"But?" I asked, bringing my knees up to my chest, wrapping my left arm around my legs. I've known Alice long enough to know that there's more that she's not saying.

"There's no chemistry between the characters, no tension. There's nothing to make me believe that these two people are supposed to be together."

"I know." I put my forehead on my knees, feeling defeated. I'd tried, but like with a lot of things lately, it hadn't been enough. I felt so disconnected from the twenty-one-year-old girl who was so excited to have her first book published. That ate, breathed, and slept for the characters she produced on the page. The girl that produced best-seller after best-seller. It used to be that writing was all I thought about, all I wanted to do. I couldn't remember the last time I felt that way. That scared me a little.

"Listen, Bella, I know the last few years have been hard for you. I know that." Alice had been my agent since I first started. She'd been with me through a lot in the seven years we'd worked together, and we were more friends than agent and writer at this point. She knew exactly what the last few years had been like for me, what I had been through, what I was still clawing my way out of. "But if you don't produce something, they're talking about dropping you."

I sucked in a breath. I knew that was coming, I'd had the feeling after the last few times we'd spoken, but it didn't make it sting any less. It had been well before the pandemic since I'd completed anything. I'd started slowing down in mid-2019 and hadn't been able to get the momentum going again. Then COVID hit and all my hope of getting back on track went out the window with it.

I hear her close a door on her end before she continues, "I'm worried about you."

"I'm taking my meds." I defend, looking at the bottles of Lexapro and Wellbutrin on my desk. My therapist had put me on them about a year ago after everything and they helped. They made me feel more like myself.

"I don't doubt that." She states and I can tell by the sound of her voice just how worried about me she is, and I hate that I make her feel that way. "When was the last time you left your apartment?"

I don't answer right away because I have to think about it. The last time I went out was with my sisters, Jessica and Leah. They'd dragged me out to dinner, and it had been nice to be out, but that had been a few weeks ago.

Damn, when had it gotten that bad? How had I not noticed?

"Look, I can buy you some time to give you a moment to regroup, but something has to change. And I don't just mean career wise. You need to start living again, Bella. I mean it."

When we hung up, I sat there is my desk chair doing what I had been doing most days, looking at the open document on my computer, the cursor blinking, taunting me. As I looked at the screen, the thought that haunted me at night when I couldn't sleep crept in. What if I never wrote again? What if I wasn't a writer anymore? And if this was the case, who was I?

-IS-

"Bee!" Leah exclaimed when I walked into Mom's kitchen that night. She'd been calling me Bee since she was toddler. It had been one of those things that she'd said once, and it just stuck. She was the only one that was allowed to call me that.

She ran over to me, wrapping me up in a hug. Leah gave the best hugs and I let her warmth sink into me.

"Nice apron," I teased when we parted, pulling on her ponytail. She was wearing the frilly white apron that used to be our grandmother's. She always wore it when she helped mom cook, and I always teased her.

She rolled her eyes, giving me a playful shove. "Shut up."

Leah was the baby of the family at twenty-three. She was basically walking sunshine, lighting up every room she walked into. She still had the rosy, cherubic cheeks she'd been born with. Her face still had the softness of girlhood and I hoped that never went away. Jessica was in the middle at twenty-five. Where Leah was soft, Jessica was lithe, carrying herself with a confidence that was enviable. Leah and I were petite like our mom, but Jessica got all of our dad's height. I never thought it was fair that she was taller than me. I was the oldest after all.

The three of us shared dad's thick, wavy brown hair. While Jessica had mom's blue eyes, Leah and I had dad's chocolate brown ones. We all looked so much like our dad, I wonder if it hurt mom to look at us now.

"What are y'all making? It smells amazing." I commented, following her further into the kitchen.

Our parents had the space renovated after my sisters and I moved out. All of the appliances were high-end, stainless steel that gleamed in the soft overhead light. Mom had decided to go with white marble counter tops, much to Dad's chagrin. He'd wanted something warmer to counteract the starkness of the appliances, but ultimately, Mom had won. She'd paired it with bright white cabinets. It looked like a kitchen straight out of a magazine.

"Chicken pot pie. It should be ready any minute." Leah replied and my mouth watered.

"Hello!" Jessica's voice and footsteps echoed from down the hall. She appeared in the kitchen moments later, carrying a bottle of white wine.

"Hey." Leah and I replied in unison.

Jessica swept into the room, placing the wine on the counter before she took her jacket off, throwing it over one of the bar stools at the kitchen island.

"That's not the kind I asked you to get." Leah had the bottle in her hand, examining the bottle.

Jessica ran her fingers through her shoulder length hair. She'd chopped off a few months ago. "I know, but mom texted asking me to get a Riesling." She tossed Leah her phone so our sister could read the text herself.

"Shit, she did." Leah handed the phone back to Jessica, looking annoyed. "I don't know why should would've done that."

"I'm sure there's a good Riesling for that." I joked, taking a grape from the fruit bowl on the island.

"Oh, boo." Leah hit me with a hand towel while I laughed at my own joke.

"Speaking of mom," Jessica started, opening the bottle of wine and pouring herself a glass. "Where is she?"

"Grandma called." Was Leah's only reply, because that's all anyone had to say. Grandma had been calling a lot the last several months.

"Oh." Jessica took a sip of her wine as a hush fell on the room, none of us wanting to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

I think we were all thankful when the oven timer went off.

-IS-

I always enjoyed dinner with Mom and sisters. We were all busier than when we younger, so the dinners were more infrequent now, but it was still nice to get together. It was something precious now, which made it that much better.

Jessica was regaling us with a story of how irritating her new lab partner, Mike, was. She was in her senior year of medical school at Duke. They'd been back at school for just over a month now and it seemed that every conversation I had with her, she mentioned Mike. The writing was written on the wall for those two so clearly, that it was ridiculous.

"How was your day, Bella?" Jessica asked once she was finished with her story, taking a sip of her wine.

We were all on our second or third glass, and I was starting to feel warm, my limbs becoming languid. I was in that space between being sober and drunk. I didn't drink much these days and had become kind of a lightweight. My college self would be so disappointed.

"I had a call with Alice today." My mind goes back to that moment in my apartment, those thoughts once again whispering in the back of my mind, determined not to be ignored. I swear they sounded louder than they did before. They seemed to be getting louder by the day.

"How did that go?" It was mom who asked, examining me in a way that only a mom could, peeling back the layers to see the very heart of me. It was creepy how good mothers were at that.

Shaking the whispering words of doubt out of my mind, I replied: "She thinks I need a change."

I'm too afraid to mention the fact that my publisher is talking about dropping me, that my career is in jeopardy. I'm afraid that if I say these words out loud, it will be like speaking them into realty.

"Well," mom announces, changing the subject, for which I'm grateful. "How about a game of Boggle before we call it a night?"

Leah brightens, "I'll go get it!"

She jumped from her chair, heading out of the kitchen to the hall closet where we kept the board games.

"There's no way that you'll be able to reach it." Jessica stands from the table, following behind her. "I'll help you, munchkin."

Leah growled, "Don't call me that! I'm not that short!"

"Whatever you say, munchkin." Jessica quipped.

They bickered as they left the room, just like they always did.

"She's not wrong," Mom said once my sisters disappeared down the hallway. "Alice, she's not wrong. You're twenty-eight, you should be out having fun, not holding yourself up in your apartment."

"I'm not in my apartment now, am I?" I joked, but she lifted her brow at me like she would when I was kid and being a smart-ass to try to get myself out of a punishment. Like when I was sixteen and snuck out of the house to hang out with my friends. I thought that it was a good idea at the time to joke about how at least I wasn't high like my friends were. She didn't need to know that the only reason I wasn't, was because we'd gotten caught by my friend Irina's dad when he came home from night shift early, before I'd had a chance to take a hit.

"Maybe you need a change of scenery."

I furrowed my brow, "A change of scenery?"

"Yeah. I think getting away would be good for you."

I thought about it for a moment. It had been a couple of years since I'd been anywhere and the thought of getting out of my rut didn't sound bad at all. In fact, it sounded kind of good. If I stayed here, I'd stay in my pattern, in my apartment, never leaving, because it was easy. But that hadn't gotten me anywhere.

"I think you're right," I told her. "I think I do need to get away. I just don't know where I'd go." I didn't have a lot of time. Alice had emailed me this morning, saying that she'd bought me a month. I needed to go someplace where I could work that wouldn't provide too many distractions.

"You could go to the cabin."

Dad had purchased the cabin on Fontana Lake, up in the mountains. It was quiet and isolated, but not too isolated. It was near a small town, so it wasn't completely without civilization. I hadn't been there in years, since I was in sixth grade, at least. We used to go every summer, spending time of the lake, but then Dad got a new job that required him to travel more, so we'd stopped going. The summers we spent up there we were some of my favorites. I could still remember the way the air smelled like fresh water and pine trees, the way I'd fall asleep in Dad's lap, him rocking me on the porch swing.

"Are you sure you're okay with me going?" I asked, even though I couldn't stop thinking about how much that place meant to me and how right it felt for it to be the place I got myself together.

For the first time in a while, something felt right.

She didn't reply. Instead, she got up from the table, going down the short hall to Dad's office. I could hear her rummaging around before she came back with a key on a silver key ring.

"Someone should use it."

If I knew then, what I know now when I took that key. My entire outlook would've been different. But that's the thing about hindsight. It's 20/20.

I'd gone home that night and packed. I didn't give myself too much time to think about it, because if I did, I'd talk myself out of going, no matter how right it felt. I should've planned better, should've gotten earlier start. If I had, I probably wouldn't have ended up on a dark mountain road with a flat tire, no jack, and no cell service in the pouring rain.

My soaking wet foot was just the icing on the cake.

I put my phone back in my bag, adjusting the cross-body strap that was digging into my neck. I was starting to question the rightness of this trip, of being in this town. I was feeling like a failure, again. Maybe I couldn't trust my gut anymore.

I stood there on the side of the road, getting more soaked by the second and I got angry.

Angry with myself.

Angry that I'd been letting the universe win.

Angry that I'd stopped trying.

Angry that I hadn't even noticed.

"You got this." I whispered to myself; my hands balled into fists. "Just keep going."

And that's what I did. I put one foot in front of the other as the sky continued to darken, and rain continued to come down. Because I was making a change.

I was trying.

A/N: Kind of a short first chapter, but it felt right to end it here. I'll post the second chapter in a few days. This story was originally supposed to be a one-shot, but it kept growing in my mind. I'm really bad at writing one-shots, I guess. My story One Night was also supposed to be one. We see how well that went.

I would love to know what you think.

See you next chapter.