The faint murmuring of a voice distracted me.

It danced in my ears, tickling the back of what could be my brain. It was almost tormenting.

It was an inner music I couldn't supress. A music of a tortured soul.

Screaming and despair. Sad. Anger. I wanted to gouge my eyes out.

I was perched on the edge of my seat. The food suddenly made me nauseous. Every sound of a fork hitting a plate of a the intake of breath was like a thuder clap. It sent shivers down my spine and I felt my spine curling inside of me.

"Nikki?" Alex murmured. He began leaning forward and reached out to touch my shoulder. His hand was cold. My shoulder convulsed.

"Nikki, holy shit...are you okay?" His eyes were pools of concern. He wanted to do something, but he wasn't sure.

"I don't know what's wrong," I whispered, "I feel sick."

"Are you going to puke?" Alex murmured. He was keeping his voice low.

I needed to scream. Somebody close to me was hurting, and hurting bad. They were hurting themselves.

"Can we please just leave?" I gasped. "Please, Alex? Anywhere but here. Or your house. Just somewhere."

"Is...um...okay," Alex rose quickly and pulled me to my feet by my cold, sweaty hands. He was shaking slightly, licking his lips. He was nervous. I tended to observe peoples' nervous tendencies. And those were his.

Of course, I didn't blame him for being so fucking nervous. I probably looked like I was dying.

As we left the little street-side cafe, the voice began to ebb and I could hear my thoughts in my head again.

The sky above us was a pale blue, dotted with a few lonely white and puffy clouds. THey drifted across like little lost sailboats on the sea. I found a strange peace in them.

With my eyes fixed on the little sailboats in the sky, and Alex standing in front of me in his blue jeans and gray t-shirt, I began to feel an icy calm wash over me. Whatever was wrong had passed. I was okay.

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As we departed from Tucker's and I tore my eyes away from that hypnotizing sight in the sky, all was well. My head was silent. Apart from the constant stream of random melodies; those, however, had been drowned out in my little anxiety attack.

Alex had the windows open in his car, "Seattle Skies" by Close To Home flowing out of the speakers, his arm dangling out of the window only slightly, I leaned back as we drove along the highway lining the ocean.

The sight to the left of me was white sand, and bright blue ocean waters. I could have lost myself in that deep, deep sea that had was so unknown. At that moment, Alex was my anchor. He held me down and kept me from flying away with my own self.

It didn't make sense to anybody else at that time but I.

We didn't speak as we drove to this unknown location. We didn't have to.

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I felt safer than I had ever felt before, with Alex. For some reason, I felt I could trust him irrevocably and completely.

Perhaps it was because he saw me in one of my lesser moments. I had usually tried to contain myself at all times, keep myself together no matter where I was. I was typically the only person to see my little breakdowns.

Being happy was no easy job. It was a fucking chore. Constantly putting a smile on my face was hard enough. Trying to maintain happiness was where the complications were made.

It was like sweeping up a floor. All that dirt has to go somewhere, right? Eventually, when you brush all the little stuff off, it turns into a big dirt pile and there was no way to get rid of it. That was when I sat in my room or my bunk and just cried while listening to sad songs. Cried about how fucking useless I was.

Those breakdowns lasted for a few days and happened every few months. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary. It was simply feeling overwhelmed.

But, considering I was the only person that saw me when I wasn't being happy, Alex had gone through some kind of rite of passage in seeing me flip out. I didn't know what it was, but if it wasn't something normal, it was an attack of some sort.

We ended up at a closed, rocky beach an hour south of Baltimore. The air was comfortably warm. Perhaps the same warmth as my body temperature. I felt invisible with the equal heats.

Alex was leading me to the water by my hand. He seemed to know exactly where were going. Maybe he spent days at that beach when he needed to think. I would have.

We stopped just at the shoreline. Where the water lapped at our feet, nipped at my TOMS, licked the tips of his Vans.

"The calm after the storm..." I whispered. It felt good to be released of the grip of such a menacing moment.

We sort of just stood there, our hands intertwined. Staring at the horizon.