Halo Of Fire: An Angel In Trouble

New Beginnings

THREE WEEKS EARLIER.

It is generally known that when you move, you are one of two people. The first is the type that actively searches all the attractions of the city, can't wait to make new friends, and already has a housewarming party set up. And the second is the type that is forced to move, is sad or depressed about leaving what they've always considered their home, and refuses to accept that the move is happening and is likely permanent. I fell into a third category which only takes effect if you're running from something. I was ready to start over and try anew, but I was still mourning most of the life I left behind. It didn't help that the weather was muddy and gross to increase that sense of dread and mourning already wallowing in my stomach.

I was accustomed to the views of the quaint Pennsylvania town I had grown up in, with blocks of houses equally spaced between each other, cut green lawns, and pretty trees filling the sky above the sidewalk. I longed for something familiar, something that would remind me of home, but the lake that we visited on a regular basis to hang out by during the summers, the green woods that filled the hills that surrounded the town, and the big oak tree that housed a wooden fort we would use at night to hang out in, were a distant memory.

I was now surrounded by October rain pouring down on New York in a curtain, hiding the majority of the city from the view of the car window. It was raining so hard that it seemed that a flood was about to engorge the buildings. The roads had become rushing rivers that reminded me of the hoards of people in the movies staged in New York. They were always in a rush, always late for something, always busy. I watched, with my head against the window, at the water splashing up and out from the tires of the car, and then I raced the little droplets of water down the glass.

This was my second time in the big apple. My first time visiting the city was with my father, just before he died. But that was a long time ago when I was still a kid hoping to make the world a better place. Now I knew there was nothing I could do and nothing I could change that would make this messy, sad, and greedy world any better than it already was. I missed my dad and Tatiana, and I missed my everyday boring, excruciatingly socially awkward life back home.

"We're almost there." my aunt Kristy said looking over at me. The aura around her body told me immediately that she was calm, almost at peace, but that she was also worried and hopeful at the same time. The colors would wrestle for dominance over each other, now the gray would win, then the green. I nodded my head quietly, feeling the bumps of the road with my forehead. I didn't have else to say, and though I had tried many times to explain how I could read her emotions, I quickly realized that the more I talked about it the more doctors I'd have to see, so I never brought it up.

I had seen these wisps of colored flames wrapped around people for practically my whole life. Everyone I had ever encountered had one, the colors were usually pretty uniform when it came to their meaning, and they didn't emanate heat. They were like refractions of light that only I seemed to be able to see. In some way, they allowed me to read people like open books. I used to talk about them with my father as if he knew what I was talking about. But as I grew older, he grew sicker, and my aunt started taking care of me more often, she became aware of the fact that "I thought" I could see something and decided it was time I see a therapist, and then another, and another, and another. Some medications would dull them out, but they'd never fully go away and with time I learned not to talk about them.

"Are you ok?"

"As ok as I can be given the circumstances." I had accepted that this cement jungle was my new reality.

She nodded, remaining quiet. Then she put the blinker on and pulled into an underground garage. She spoke to the guy at the gate and got the parking spot assigned to the apartment.