Welcome to Gaia! ::

When sleep comes, its usually fitful. Sam can't remember the last night she had an easy, restful sleep. She'd kill for just a night of no dreaming. Nothingness sounded relaxing. Tonight the dream felt more vivid. It was more like a retelling of her life than a fantasy.

She sits at the scratched up old table in the kitchen of her childhood home. Its so old and worn that when she puts her elbows on the edge it wobbles. They never had the money to replace it, but Sam kind of loves it now. It's been there for as long as she can remember. A permanent fixture in her life.

She's spread out brochures across its surface. Each one is colorful and professional. Enticing. Brochures from universities near and far. They all offer the same promises - a bright future with real world experience. Some offered it with pictures of beautiful trees in the spring. Some offered it with smiling young faced in front of the official looking stairs of an impressive building. But they all come at a cost. One that she can't afford.

She's done this to herself so many times that she's almost numb to the disappointment of looking at all these closed doors. Some part of her thinks that if she just stares at it for long enough an option will make itself clear. She doesn't have the grades for the really great scholarships, and financial aid only covers so much. She wouldn't have enough for living expenses, let alone the extraneous costs like books.

She sighs and rests her head on the old table. It wobbles.

The dream shifted and the table and brochures disappeared. In their place were a shining clean counter and rows of cages.

She can't believe she's been hired. No experience, no contacts. It had taken well over a month of searching and constant applications, but she did it. The noises from pet cages echo her excitement as she stands behind the counter for her very first day of work.

In her head, she's already calculating her savings. If she puts away twenty, thirty, fifty dollars from every paycheck she'll get there one day. Even if all she could afford are community classes, she'd at least be paying for some kind of higher education.

She was taking the steps she needed to take. If she just kept looking forward, there was no way she could be stopped.

The pet store was hard work. Like, really hard. It was a lot of cleaning, a lot of memorizing pet care facts and being able to answer random, sometimes stupid, questions on the fly. There were days she wished she could quit because dealing with customers AND animals was too much.

But there were also days when she saw a kid go home with a new fish, or a couple adopt a small kitten, or someone would fall in love with an excited hamster. Those days made it a little easier to bear, because she could see the joy on someones face and know she was helping them achieve that in some small way. If she just looked at the little things like that, she could keep going.

Sam woke up slowly, feeling empty. She tried pretty hard not to think about things from before day zero. If school was hard to get into now, it was next to impossible now. All that remained of it was the university faction, and they weren't exactly getting an education to better themselves now. All anyone was trying to do was survive to the next day.

She drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them tight. She tried not to think about the pets either. She'd never thought that the day she ran meant she was leaving behind the pets to meet whatever fate. It was only marginally comforting that they weren't locked up in their cages. At least out and about the mall they had the potential to scavenge and survive on their own. But that didn't mean that all of them would make it.

She supposed, on a logical level, that she shouldn't blame herself. Not even the humans taking refuge in the mall could control their own fate. They were no better off than the animals. But still, the emotional parts of Sam's brain told her that there was something she could have done. She could have taken her time and made sure the animals would be okay somehow. Instead she'd gotten scared and ran.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes tight. She couldn't think of any of that. If she dwelled on the past, or even the future, she wasn't focusing on the present. And that surely meant she wouldn't survive. She had to keep her eyes on the road ahead.