Lailah brushed her blonde hair out of her face attempting to tuck it behind her ear. She leaned over the open trunk of her little car in lot at the park n ride attempting to grab her overstuffed backpack filled with everything she had taken from her apartment before walking out the door with no sense of where she was going or why. As she unzipped the hidden pocket and felt for her passport, her hair fell as out of place as everything else in her life.

Everything except her passort, that is. Her passport was exactly where it had been when she check for it at the gas station just 5 minutes before. She had a storage locker that she had managed to move a few things into a week or two earlier. It was no where near filled, just littered with a few crates of her old journals and notebooks. There was a trunk with some canvases and a cheap plastic set of drawers that had an array of art supplies as random as her thoughts.

Truth be told, her mind raced so fast that sometimes she scared her self. Her little dog had moved from the front seat of the car to the back, to the front and back again. His tail wagged faster when her eyes caught his. A smile kissed her lips for a mere second before the worry lines on her forehead came back.

Her smile used to be her best quality, it was the thing that she loved about her appearance and everyone complemented her on. She glowed once upon on time when she thought she had love in her life.

It had gone away slowly--the love she thought she had. They were quickly great lovers, slowly the best of friends, until one day they had a conversation that seemed hypothetical about what they would be doing with their lives if they had chosen differently and somehow through the veil of what ifs she heard him say he would have chosen something else.

She loved him with all of her heart, but no matter what she did how much she flashed that smile of hers. No matter how many times she went down on him or cooked dinner or told him how much she loved him--he didn't. He said he did but at the end of the day they were just words of an emotionally unavailable man.

His desire for her lessoned. He tried to soften the blow of the rejection by telling her she was hyper-sexual--a nympho even and changing the subject to something else. Chalking it up to a difference in sex drive and not to what it really was--feelings that waned like the moon on the last night that she had spent with him.

She didn't know it would be the last night. At the time she thought they would be together forever. She had even joked about how many times her mom had asked where he was when she was over and how she seemed genuinely worried that Lailah had been concealing a break up from the family-asking at least seven times if they were still together and why he wasn't there.

She didn't know how to answer him when he didn't say anything in return.

She had driven home that night and had to. turn off the radio because her thoughts were trying so hard to outscream whatever she put on. The volume in her head was so loud she could barely find her place on the streets she had driven down hundreds of times in the last seven years.

In her minds eye, she looked for him in the rearview mirror only to see he hadn't waited to see if her car started. Her hand felt the heat leave her finger tips as it was no longer touching him but stung by the rainy mist in the air. In that park and ride, she snapped back into reality when she felt the weight of her backpack dig into her spine and the noise of the trunk closing silenced that of her mind.

Mister Wendall, her little dog, pawed at the window in an effort to garner her attention. She had renamed him after the Arrested Development song when she had been gifted him by someone who had chosen to live somewhere they couldn't keep him. It was now rather ironic that the two of them were effectively homeless.

She told everyone she was going on a business trip. Really she had no idea where she was going after tonight. She opened the door and her and Mr. Wendal started the short trek to the strorage locker where she hoped the two of them could spend the night undetected until she could get a plan together in the morning.

She knew only one thing--she was in a rut and she had to get out. Her heart ached so badly that she didn't seem to care if she lived or died; but she knew that either way she couldn't do it here.