Unexpected

Chapter 1

I walked down the street feeling numb. My life hasn't been so miserable as lately. College was going wrong. My PhD degree couldn't be more wrong. I couldn't concentrate. I lost my job. I barely had money to pay my house and just a while ago my boyfriend, the one I thought was the one, broke up with me. Colton and I had been together for quite some time and that was another stab in my heart. I felt like the world was coming down on my shoulders and damn... it was heavy! Too heavy. Enough to make me crawl and crumble. Enough to make a 30-year-old to think about her whole life and her own choices. I concluded I had done nothing, but bad choices over the last 30 years. That can't be good.

As the heat burned my skin, my parents' words rang in my mind. I had moved to LA against their will. They've always considered it a lost case, but I felt that same way about the little village I grew up in Illinois. I have arrived to this immense city ten years ago, just when I was 20. I began to work right away and went to college. There, I met Colton and I was full of dreams and expectations. All that came to an end right this day. My dreams had been shattered. My soul was wounded immensely. My pride too.

Like I said, I was walking down the street completely lost. Not knowing exactly where I was going or who I was stomping. I pushed quite a few people around. The sky was clouded but it was extremely hot. The books I carried in my arms were becoming extremely heavy. My body was sticky from all the perspiration and I felt tiny drops in my temples. It was suffocating in LA. The air was thick, barely breathable and I kept going, stumbling into people. Trying to get nowhere, because I didn't have anywhere to go. My vision blurred with tears prompting in my eyes as Colton's last words kept popping up.

"Ooh..." I whimpered, not caring if people passing me by could hear me.

I was hurting. I was truly hurting and my pride was deadly wounded.

When you think things can't get any worse, they always do. The heat and clouded sky turned into heavy rain in seconds. I stopped walking and looked up at the sky.

"Thank you!" I yelled.

I felt my black hair being drenched. My white shirt completely soaked, and so were my shorts. My feet slipping off the flip flops as I walked and I was just more pissed off than ever. Tears began to fall unashamedly, but then with the heavy rain no one could notice I was crying.

"Fuck this!" I muttered all alone and at the same time taking a hand to my face to clean the tears. There was no use in doing so as the rain kept falling down on me.

"Fuck this shit!" I said louder.

I wasn't seeing anyone and with that, I just felt like hitting a wall and my books flew off my arms, landing on the floor and sheets of paper scattered all over the curb. I groaned loud. A little squeak might have escaped my lips too.

"Can't you see where you're going?" A guy dressed in black told me with a rather rude tone.

"Look what you've done!" I exclaimed crouching and beginning to pick up everything off the ground.

Books soaked in water. Sheets of paper destroyed. My essay tore into pieces. I felt my shoulders shake as I subsided into heavy crying. I was giving up. I had to give up. I kneeled on the floor doing so and realized a lot of legs around me. There were at least four people around me. I felt a hand on my shoulder though.

"Let me help you." I heard a deep voice saying. "Get off the floor." The same voice asked me and his hand began to pull my arm to help me stand.

I was fragile so I obeyed. I noticed a tattoo on this person's hand and then I was able to see his whole arm covered in ink. I was never too fond of it, so I wondered if I wasn't in the middle of some gang and was going to be robbed the next second. So, I shook his arm violently away from me and this other guy came near.