There was a light breeze blowing that made the tops of the trees sway back and forth. If it weren't for the alcohol that Raina had already ingested, she was sure that she would be a little more fearful. If she squinted, the branches looked the same as they had in her dreams. She remembered every last detail of it unlike most dreams that danced through her brain as she slumbered. Usually she would wake and for the first few moments the memories of that night time frolicking would be so vivid that she could rattle off everything about it. She could tell you what she wore, where she was and every breath she took that lead her through those moments of her dream. But no sooner would she climb out of bed, pad barefoot into the bathroom and wash her face before the dream would slip out of her mind as if it had never existed.
It was these violent dreams that refused to do the same. Instead, they clung to her viciously like demonic creatures. They danced in her brain and teased her with their memories. While normally, the idea of sitting beside the water in the dark used to be relaxing, it was those dreams that made her afraid of it all. But thanks to the alcohol, she couldn't care less whether those trees came for her or not. To be honest, Raina couldn't think of a single reason why she ever ran from them in the first place. Sure the moment the branches wrapped around her was frightening, and of course it stung as the dry wood chips scraped her flesh from her bones, but she couldn't find anything, any reason, why she wanted to keep running.
It wasn't that she lost her reason for living now that her heart had been broken, but there was a deeper ache that came from it. Mix that into the soup pot that was the lack of communication between she and her parents since her sister's death, and it was a deadly concoction. Hell, the loss of her sister was Hell in and of itself. Every morning she found it hard to catch her breath until every last fiber of her being burned to life, searing with each movement she made. She desperately desired to talk to her mother again, to get advice on how to handle her life now. How to get up out of bed like she forced herself to do every day, and how to keep walking forward when all she wanted to do was hide again under the sheets. Those were things that only a mother could teach you and she didn't have hers, at least at the time being.
Who knew if that was ever going to change? Raina could hope all she wanted but that didn't change the fact that her mother was a stubborn woman and the loss of her eldest sister had killed a part of all of them. And some things, she was learning, you just never could recover from.
All that thought of her sister had her twisting the cap off again. This time she sat up a little so she didn't spill it on herself like she had the last sip she had taken. Licking the excess liquid from her lips, Raina kept her eyes on the tree tops--just in case they reached for her. She hadn't realized that she wasn't alone when she found herself humming a song that used to put her in a good mood when she was just a little girl. It was the snapping, deep voice that caught her attention. For a moment, in her inebriated state, she looked questioningly at the trees. Maybe she had slipped off into some dream somewhere during the night... maybe she would remember to not run.