Rough beginnings.

It was that nauseating feeling of "Oh fuck, it's going to happen" that tightens your stomach in the worst way. Like there's nothing to do but fall to your knees and throw up not only everything you've eaten that day, but everything you haven't even touched yet for the next week and a half. Like some obnoxious little time warp of dread that gets inside you and ignites every cell into a microscopic timer counting down and you've seen the inevitable future already.

That's where I was at.
Absolutely and pathetically defeated, which is a miserable place for any heroine.

I guess this isn't really the greatest place to start a story either, given the great tragedy of the whole situation. By this point I was almost unable to feel anything. I could tell my arm was broken, and probably other bones were too, but I couldn't pinpoint spots of pain past feeling like one giant injury and I hadn't been able to keep up with the damage as it happened.

If I tried hard to peek at the wall, I could see M practically wrapped around his computer. He was still alive I think, but how long was kind of a big question. I didn't even want to know what had happened to his girlfriend, because before the first blurry ambush, I'd seen the state of the place and all the blood had to have come from somewhere.

You see, they say that cliched line about life flashing before your eyes in like... every movie, book, song, play, awful teenage poem... It's everywhere. But either it's not true or it's a fluke, because my mind was going a million miles a second to try to figure out two things: what to do next, and what I could have done differently beforehand. I was always one of those people who thought everything added up, and my current hazy thought was that maybe if I'd had breakfast, I would have been late that morning, and M would have met me somewhere else, and this and that and the other. It was comforting to blame the cheerios, in some sickeningly odd way.

It's funny how quickly you can think when you're panicking inside and funnier how (no matter what you actually think about) you rarely reach a good solution.

So let's start this differently and rewind a little. Back before I finally collapsed to the floor, with that irksome little bubble of blood dripping down my lips, and back before I walked into he house to find it looking like the set of a horror movie. Back before whoever the hell was rolling me over now had attacked M and before our argument that morning that sent him home early to talk to Amy. Before that day, or that week actually.
Back to about three weeks ago, which may just be the beginning.