Metanoia - A journey of changing one's heart, mind, or way of life.
Emalyn Gilbert never knew what her purpose was, all she knew was that someday she would find it. A journey full of doppelgangers, vampires, witches, and death was not what she had i...
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Four months later
Emlyn Gilbert shifted through her hygiene cabinet in search of her body wash. It amazed her how much stuff she had in here that she had forgotten about. Granted, a lot of things had been slipping her mind recently, i.e., sleeping. Stretching her hand into the back of her cabinet, Lyn finally pulled out her lavender-scented body wash. Her parents had gotten that brand for her years ago, saying that it was supposed to help with sleep. It had worked great when they got it for her, and ever since then, she hadn't used a different brand once. But that was then, and this was now. Now, nothing could keep her asleep when the darkness seeped through her bedroom windows, snuffing out the light the same way she imagined water seeping through the car windows, snuffing out her parents' lives.
Despite the usefulness of the body wash fading, she kept using it out of habit. Slipping into the shower, Lyn turned on the water and allowed the heat to overwhelm her. Showers had become her favorite part of the day. The heat numbed all her senses and allowed for a precious fifteen minutes where her grief was not the only thing she felt. But much to the relief of her red skin, her scrub had finished caressing even the hardest-to-reach crevices of her skin. With no more excuses to use, Lyn turned the shower off, and the pressurizing heat disappeared along with her escape.
Falling back into reality, she let her feet coat the floor with water and pulled a towel around her body. Tying it into a tight not to ensure it wouldn't fall and reveal her body to the only person in the room (herself), Lyn turned to face herself in the mirror.
"One day," she whispered under her breath. "You can make it through one day." She matched her fake words of reassurance with the best fake smile she could muster, proud when it looked semi-realistic. She turned the door handle of her Jack and Jill bathroom that connected her and Elena's rooms and walked back into her room.
The orange glow outlined the houses that made up Mystic Falls as the sun seeped through the darkness and into the morning sky. Emalyn's eyes flashed over to her digital clock, where the little red numbers read 5:56. With nothing better to do, Emalyn moved over to her closet and began to sift through her rack of clothes to find something first-day worthy. As she dragged her eyes over the clothes, she wondered, what gives yes, I've gotten over the fact that my whole world fell apart less than four months ago, and no, I do not need your fake sympathy? Nothing quite matched that exact description, so she settled for a pair of flair jeans, a green camisole topped with a white cardigan, and finally paired it with some Converse to finish off the look.
She knew that to everybody else, she would look exactly the same as she did before everything went to hell. To her, though, nothing looked the same. She had always been good at reading people. Even the hardest shells to crack were open books to her. Due to this, she knew that all the signs of her distress were easy to see: the smile that looked just a bit too convincing, the posture that indicated she hadn't held her head high in a while, and most of all, the dead look behind her eyes. She had put on makeup to mask the sadness that covered her face, but there was nothing she could do to combat the fact that her eyes were simply no longer full of life.
