Mays life had always been different than most girls her age, while most girls were going to high school dances or getting their permits, May was working 2 part time jobs, While other girls were preparing for their junior prom May was turning in her accelerated learning packets. Sure May was never the brightest student, or the most punctual, and yeah she wasn’t the most social or fun girl her age, but May was the most hard working. See May had a plan. She’d work as many hours and save as much money as she possibly could before graduating, and then she be gone. Away from her pill popping narcissist of a mother and her tragically all to familiar lower class american home life. That was the plan anyways.

Theodor Petre

My life bred up a nothing more than a depressed suicidal, perpetually afraid little boy. From what I can remeber of my childhood, if one would even call it a childhood, it was one of pain and memories heartbreaking and soul shattering enough to kill the spirit of any child. If I even had a spirit to begin with it definitely killed mine. Of all my earliest childhood memories there are very few I look back on with nastolgic sadness, and while others crave for their childhood back, I crave to go back, to stop my younger self from every having experienced the pain I know he had to experience.

Humans have always relied on one another for warmth, both physical and emotional. “Warmth was created by bodily contact. Comfort was a matter of bodies,” French historian Daniel Roche wrote this in 1981 in Le Peuple de Paris, and by all means he was correct, I’ve found those around me do tend to search for the comfort of another when we’re in need, yes for just physical warmth if one needs it, but very much as so for emotion warmth and comfort. Like those I’m pain, either physical of emotional, needing a a comfortable hug or cuddle. We are simply creatures that seek comfort. Comfort in one another. I’ve never needed that, never been the kind to seek out comfort, even in those moments growing up when maybe I really needed something comforting, it was just not how I’d been raised. Even to those I’d become close with, I’ve always felt like I’d be cold forever, and alone forever.

Fin stood before the mirror frowning. The scale told him he’s lost another couple pound. So here he stood dressed in his usual turtle neck and tight jeans, trying to decide which over coat would give him the appearance that he’d gained instead of lost. His actual winter coat, a white puffer coat the girls had bought him last month so they could be ‘twinsies’ for the season, looked far larger on him than it had when they bought it. And his hoodie looked asf if he’d stolen it from Adalets dad. Not that the tall Barlow man would ever wear a hoodies. The boy sighed deeply, before stripping Himself of the hoodie and heading back for his closet. After tossing on an old thick knit sweater that had once belonged to his late grand-pere, and the long caramel overcoat Griffin had given him last winter. Pairing his look with his usual doc loafers, the boy gave himself one last thorough look before finally deciding he better greet the Barlowes down stairs.

Prudence Hawthorn never knew her father. Growing up she had had many almost step-dads, men who her mother fell in love with and was with for some time, but none who ever lasted. Prudence’s mom wasn’t the type of woman who just slept around or brought random men home, but she did fall in love easy, she was a romantic. The type of person that craved romantic intimacy, but she was also the type that never saw the red flags until they were tearing her relationships apart. Her mother, prudence’s nana, would say it was Prudence’s fathers fault. He had broken her mamas heart. Nana often said her mother’s heart was unhealable, and that she ‘loved’ these men only to try and heal what couldn’t be healed. Nana hated Prudence’s biological father. Though she never would speak of why, but she made it know time and time again that she did. And sometime, prudence’s was sure nana hated her too. She knew she looked like him, and she knew her nana hated that.

Small town hold stories. And much like commandaria, these aged story’s live on. Growing up in the city Trin was used to the constant hustle and bustle of people. Since she was a young girl she had found peace in watching, listening, and observing the hundreds of people that walked past her down town apartment. The noise, whether it be of traffic in the streets below her or the race of feet and rain on the streets. She found it all so calming. Often as a child Trin would find herself watching the city chaos from her roof top hideaway, when she wasn’t there she was sitting ‘reading’ on the small patch or wild flowers that sat huddled between her building and the restaurant next door, where she’d listen to those around her. Observing. Taking everything in. That love of the city was most definitely the reason she despised the small town she had been forced to call home. But what could she do? Her mother was dead. And her father was as good as. Heart broken over her mothers death, he a was a barely a shell of who he once was. But maybe there was a light at the end of her foggy tunnel and maybe, just maybe her people watching, would help..