Growing Hope

Chapter 1- The Beginning

Five Hundred and Fifty-Four Days.

That is the number of days in a year and a half. That is also the number of days it took for Kiara's life to completely change. The beautifully woven life that she had lived for 15 years, one that had all the beautiful colours of happiness, love, friendship and warmth had come apart, like a scissor cutting through abruptly and haphazardly, without any sense of what it was leaving behind. The carefully knitted foundations of her life came apart without the slightest hesitation, and then it only took one tug of the thread for it all to come undone.

It was like running through a beautiful garden, and the beauty of it was so enwrapping that she had failed to see the elephant sized potholes faith had left and she went straight through tumbling down, in the most disgraceful way possible. Kiara was not sure whether even today she could say she had managed to pull herself out of it. She was no longer falling.... no.... but she was not out of it either. It was as though she was hanging onto a branch for dear life, it was after all her last hope. And she planned to cling onto it with all she had.

That branch for her had been to come back to the place she left behind 554 days ago.

Her father's sudden promotion had been the reason why they had decided to move. In spite of Kiara's vehement protesting against shifting and uprooting from the place she had lived for all her life and going to another state, her family and her did shift, 3 months after the news had been broken to her. And even then, the wait had only been so that she could finish her school year. Although, then school and exams had failed to matter. Leaving behind all her friends had been all she had cared about.

Still, no amount of protesting, hunger strikes or pleading from her friends had been able to change her parent's decision of shifting.

The opportunity her father was being presented with was tremendous and her mother was being offered a good position from her company in the new location as well, they had not wanted to lose such an amazing employee. A beautiful house awaited them, as was seen by the pictures that her parents had shown her in hopes to change her mind and it seemed to be the best thing that had ever happened to her parent's careers or lives.

Kiara however could not shake the feeling of foreboding doom that seemed to make permanent residence in her stomach as they packed up their belongings and shifted. Initially, Kiara had pinned down the feeling as nervous tension and anxiety over starting a new school and meeting new people. She never had been good at first meetings or introductions, and sometimes with her putting on herself the added pressure of doing everything right and not becoming a joke she ended up fumbling and stammering her way through a situation which did not help with her initial fear of being the clown of the town.

Little did she know that the feeling that remained with her was not one that deserved to be ignored, that it had been the alarm bells that faith had been ringing to warn her. Eventually though she jotted down the feeling as another one of her over thinking habits and when the scissors came ready to snap her life into two ugly pieces, that foreboding feeling came back with full force, however too late, and in the form of an anxiety attack.

Today, still when having to face a difficult situation Kiara could still feel the loose black threads of her anxiety slowing crawling up and wrapping themselves around her throat. However, now after having lived with it for almost a year, she knew that when it came, she had to press pause to whatever she was doing and concentrate on her breathing before it could climb up to her eyes, after which she will have lost the battle.

Which is exactly what she was doing on a particularly sunny Monday morning, sitting on the toilet seat in the first-floor girl's bathroom on her first day back to her previous school.