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Emma Brighton left her life behind. She'd cleaned out her bank accounts, sublet her apartment, sold her car and packed up and left in the middle of the night. Her life had become too full of pain for her to deal with after what everyone referred to as "The Accident." Everything that had mattered before The Accident didn't matter any longer after it. Her whole life had been twisted turned and thrown upside down, and it didn't matter what she or anyone else did to try and make it "better," nothing worked. She'd finally given up on her pre Accident life, and left it all behind.

With no idea what she was going to do, and not much care about what happened to her, she set off to get as far away from her past as possible. In doing so, she somehow ended up meeting a man called Skinner who played the drums for a well-known music group. He treated her like shit most of the time, but he gave her a place to sleep and because of him she won a gig selling tee shirts on each stop of the band's tour around the country. It wasn't exactly what she went to school for, but it paid her enough to keep her stomach full, she got to meet some fairly interesting people in the process, and she stayed in a new city almost every night. It was the perfect situation to keep her mind off of the demons of her past, at least most of the time.

As the eve of the one-year mark since she'd left home came upon her, she naturally took time to reflect despite the fact that she had no desire to do so. She and Skinner weren't a couple, but she often didn't know what they were. They weren't fuck buddies even though he'd suggested it many times without a shred of class. She didn't exactly want a relationship anyway, but sometimes she wondered why she let herself stick around with the guy. She figured that she probably stayed with him as another way to punish herself. Selling tee shirts turned out to be more fun than she thought it could ever be, and to balance out the fun factor, she stayed with Skinner for the pain. When he treated her like shit, she never fought back, she just told herself that she deserved it. She deserved it because after The Accident, she wouldn't allow herself to be happy, no matter what.

She found that in the year away from home she did a lot of things to punish herself. It became such a regular thing for her that after a while she did it without even having to think about it. Self-destruction took over and fed itself. First it was things like picking back up the habit of smoking after having quit years before, drinking a little more than she "should" if she felt like it, or casual sex with men who she never learned the names of. Other times it was something like not eating well enough, or at all. She sometimes went a few days before realizing that the reason she felt so shitty wasn't because she was depressed, it was because she hadn't eaten anything.

The night before her one-year anniversary of leaving home, her punishment was the cold. The concert tour had an extended stay in Chicago and although it wasn't quite winter yet, the trademark wind of the windy city was cold enough to make most people bundle up in thick coats. Emma left the hotel wearing a dress that would have easily been appropriate for that time of year back home in the warm climate of the southern U.S., but in Chicago certainly called for a coat. She didn't care though, the wind blowing over her skin making it numb was comforting in a way. Thinking of her cold skin meant that she didn't have to think about anything else.

Skinner had been tied up doing an interview of some sort and asked her to meet him on the bridge near their hotel. From there they'd go to dinner before meeting up with the rest of the band for a night of celebrating the fact that they had a night off from touring. He had no idea that it was Emma's birthday that night, no one on the tour did.

While standing on the bridge waiting for Skinner, Emma looked down at the murky water of the river below her. Every so often people would walk past her and a few times she heard people mention to one another, and sometimes directly to her, that she needed to have a coat on. She tuned them out and focused on watching the light fade from the city as she waited for Skinner. Try as she might, she couldn't help but think about the fact that it was her birthday. Exactly a year before that night she'd still been back home and it was on her birthday that she finally broke. She'd been considering leaving and not looking back, she'd sold her little red VW Bug and put all of her money in an account that she could access no matter where in the country she ended up but she hadn't completely talked herself into leaving until the night of her birthday. When she sat in her empty apartment in tears instead of celebrating it with a huge group of people like she had just about every other year of her life, she knew that she was ready. The next morning she closed up everything, and left clear instructions with her lawyer detailing under what circumstances he was to contact her, and she disappeared.

Now, she was standing on a bridge in Chicago, thousands of miles away from home, freezing cold, and it was beginning to rain.

Happy Birthday, Emma.