I'm doing this to appease my conscience and a certain someone who gave me much needed jab on the couch potato derriere to use my blog as a place to post thoughts or jibes or crap.

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She was old.

Not even two decades of worldly living and she was old. She had the eyes of the aged, jaded and cynical, lost and broken. More black than blue, more dark than light, more sad than not. Her mouth was bordered by deep grooves, lines that took root not long past her first decade of life. Her mouth pointed down.

She wasn't always like this. She used to be happier, brighter, intact. No, no. She was always plagued by worries and sadness. But she used to smile and laugh -- a counter balance to the bad, the yang to the yin.

Then she grew up.

More accurately, she was thrown into adulthood. Premature aging born from cruelty, hardships and fear. Used, abused and discarded; her emotional life ended long ago. Her physical one will follow soon. It wasn't a threat, it was fact.

Her earliest memories was of surrounding darkness, and shouting. So much shouting and screaming. In front of her, shadows past back and forth across a thin trail of light that shone a foot below her head. She wallowed in her fear.

She remembers nightmares, fear of being stalked by an alligator twice the length of her mother lying next to her on the bed. She remembers crying and shaking in her mother's arms and staring out the window at a ball of cloud in the shape of a fearsome warrior. She remembered praying to God and staring straight at the cloud... She remembered hoping, and bitter disappointment.

She went to the house of God at her mother's urging. She sang and thought and absorbed. Questions were encouraged, but hers were never answered. They couldn't answer her. In the end, she became an outcast, again, and she refused to enter. Six months later and she forgets how to pray, how to ask, how to hope.

"Blood is thicker than water."

She never believed that. She had no reason to. Her blood was not thick, and would never be. Her family useless and harsh.

No, she wasn't young. It was doubtful she ever was young. Always tired and drained of life...

She was old.