There was once a very lonely girl living far away in a busy busy street in a small town. All she wanted from life was a little chocolate ice cream today. It was a Saturday evening. It was a lovely town usually with a very pretty sky. There would have been a beautiful sunset with waves of orange, pink and slashes of purple in the sky if not for the pouring grey clouds enveloping hope. The rain was noisy, it kept hitting tin, water and pavements and was producing a different kind of sound from everything. But the rain was also very quiet. No one walked in the streets of the little town when it was pouring that way. There was no oppressing sound of happy kids, she liked kids, but, sometimes she just hated how happy they were, for no reason at all. It wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t she be so? And she hated the couples more, the way they walked hand in hand, happy or sad, like a world in themselves. It made her feel even more left out than she usually was. She had once been pretty, once had people holding her hand, once knew how to laugh so much that her stomach hurt, without feeling sad for a single moment during that laughter, without trying to hold the moment or cherish it, or feel sorry that life was not that way all the time, she knew how to laugh. Now, all that she feels is an emptiness, a hollow in her heart. She thought, it wouldn’t be so bad, she was going to be alone and alone is not the same as lonely. But now she knows different, that it wasn’t the loneliness that is hurting so much, but the effort it took to hide it, engulfing her mind like darkness. It’s eating away, slowly, so slowly, weekend by weekend, through every one of her feelings, each of them now tainted with the pain it took to hold them in the right place, the control it took, to show them when it was right, it was like a worm in her mind, eating happy things away, till slowly she forgot..

‘Kenichi!’, she said. Then she wanted to cry. But she knew that if she began there, she would simply collapse in the middle of the street. That was not proper. ‘Kenichi!’, she said again, louder.

Then she called for help. Slowly, softly, people always told her that her voice was soft, but in this rain, it was even stranger, she couldn’t even hear herself.