Catharsis

She rushed into the bathroom, her hands shaking violently as she locked the door. She sank into the floor and the tears started coming, dripping into her lap, leaving tiny, wet pools that quickly gave way to little, black spots on her jeans. They looked like miniature black holes... so dark, so empty... She stared at their gloomy emptiness as she thought about them.

All of them, one by one, how they had treated her.

drip,drip,drip,drip,drip,drip

She shut her eyes tight and tried to think of one person whom she could lean on. She grabbed the bottom of her plush bathrobe and pulled it off the hook it was hanging on behind the door. She held it close to her body and buried her face into it's warm softness.

No one...

She had never looked to her parents for support, she had always felt like more of an adult than either of them, forever trying to resolve their petty, never ending arguments; always stuck in the middle.
She didn't want to bother either of her sisters about it, Amani was never comfortable dealing with other people's problems and Maya was too young.
Musa, her brother, had grown distant from her a long time ago.
She had always been the Problem Solver, the Blame Taker, and she was getting tired of it, so tired...

And then there was HIM...
The person she had always leaned on, even if it was just in her thoughts, was the reason she was sitting here on the bathroom floor, looking to a bathrobe for comfort.

No, I will not do this...

"Suck it up, it's not the end of the world", she told herself. "You are so pathetic sometimes, stop being such a martyr..."

She re-arranged the bathroom mats, scrubbed off a spot on the bathroom mirror with her sleeve and took one last look at herself before she unlocked the door.

Her eyes were an angry, swollen red. She reached for the faucet but quickly turned it back off.

The water was too cold and no one was going to notice anyway...