The Freud System.

Chapter 1.

From a very young age I had been taught to always speak my mind. That lesson was mostly taught by my lovingly boisterous, opinionated mother Clara, yet her lesson was one of the most important I had ever learnt.

'One day Lauren, there will come a time,' she told me, 'when your morals and everything you are, will be tested. Stay true. Be opinionated. And don't let them take you away from yourself.'

She didn't expand on it further, and in turn I didn't question her. We never really had that 'best friend' mother and daughter relationship, like I see most people have. I was never upset about that, to be quite honest, I enjoyed the freedom that not being wholly connected to her gave me. A sense of my own identity and ownership of my actions. She herself had been raised similar to me, so I presume when I finally have children, I'll be the same mother to them as she was to me. Honestly, I don't mind that.

This day of 'testing of morals' came earlier than we all frankly expected. I remember distinctly, watching my mother's face drop into an overwhelming sadness. It was the only time that she had looked much older than she was. Everything was weighted down. The realisation that a new era of Hitler fascism had overruled America began to settle in. It was that time that I saw a new personality trait in me. The one of revolution. I felt that I wanted to fight for all of us; I wanted to fight against change and resist everything that was a blockade in front of me. Only, Camila, the woman who is in the centre of all of this, was exempt from my resistance - Camila, who represented everything that was so pure and humble left in this country. If being pure and humble is being a collection of open-hearted, whimsical sayings and gestures, then there was something angelic about her, some divine aura to the hopes and future of life, as if she were connected to the future, a future that knew everything would be fine once again. She was an extraordinary gift for optimism and genuine kindness, a romanticism of life that I have failed to find in anyone since or again. And she was right, her predicted future was fine in the end; it is just what happened to everyone, to us, during; the system of foul injustice, which darkened even the most pure of creatures, Camila included.

Before this, and too during, my family and I had a lot of advantages in life. We were well-to-do people, living in the posh suburbs of Miami Florida. The Jauregui's had been a prominent household name over the years, with generations of the best lawyers springing out of the family circle. You can imagine that education was a main factor in my development, so I kept my head mostly in books during teenage life (along with enjoying the advantages that being a privileged teenager gave me) and graduated from Harvard law school. After graduation, I came to Miami, partially because my friends still lived back at home, but also to work in the family business. Being a politically aware young adult was an advantage when Trump came into power. Everybody knew I was a political activist, along with being in a family of high profile lawyers, so I supposed that was why the revolutionary minds came to me.

When this happened, we formed a group. Although there was no specific name for our movement, we became official rioters of this fascist system, doing anything and everything in attempt to irradiate the fear that had bubbled through America. I believe that is also another reason I came back to Miami. Miami was the heart of immigration. This was the heart of hatred from Trump supporters, and I was prepared to take a stand, so were my revolutionary friends. Our group had come up with a strategy, go to the places in Miami where people were likely to be targeted, and help them. Support them, bring them into our homes if necessary. Make sure they are safe.

We travelled to Pinecrest. That place was a mixture of privileged and poor. Immigrants and white Americans. It was deep into the night when we got there. That time in the day when everything is eerily quiet and the world takes a momentarily stop in the darkness. The sound of the lake was the first thing to disturb the quietness of this night. It was a slow, sensuous movement, the way water so casually sloshed over the rigid rocks beneath it. There was something romantic about it all. Street lights were lit dimly, soft hues of broken amber speckled the sidewalk and lit the top crests of the lake. I don't remember seeing any stars in the sky, which equated to the darkness around it. For some reason unknown to me, I had found a romantic interest into this small city already, by just stepping out of a car and looking at its peaceful, desolate night. Although I knew, somewhere in my heart, that this peaceful quality about Pinecrest would cease to last much longer.