Her green stare was kept locked on a small thicket of dead moss that lay between the cracks of the sidewalk. Even while standing outside of the building, she could hear the distinct racket of the arcade machines over the regular tumult of the city.

The frigid December air had chilled her to the bone despite her winter-appropriate garb; she was shivering - the snow had efficiently soaked her hair, leaving individual strands to adhere to her cheeks, the skin red with a mixture of the cold and her own emotion.

In spite of her apparent awareness of all of these things, Daria was very much elsewhere. Her mind lingered in a place that had slipped through her fingers and remained just beyond her desperate reach. She'd become mentally embedded in yesterday, in the life that was so much more appealing and enriched with such fulfilling happiness. But all of that was gone now, its only remnants being the despairing yearning to turn back time.

To a minimal extent, she'd moved on, albeit only physically. Her heart remained tightly clasped in the hands of a man who no longer had any legitimate hold over anything else. Daria had heard before that the grip of a dead man was the most unyielding.

Above all, she'd heard that talking out her problems might help. Still, she kept tightlipped. The only suggestion along that line that she'd not readily discarded was the one of a journal, of writing her thoughts down on paper and stowing them away from the invasive eyes of others.

Daria held the small, black book with pages yet unfilled in her right hand. Her knuckles had gone pale from gripping it so tightly, a stark contrast from her usual beige complexion. She came to at the realization of the growing numbness in her fingertips, snapping out of the life she was so reluctantly far removed from, and stepped inside the Asylum Arcade.

As she stepped behind the counter, she placed the book down and stared at it for a moment. Slowly, she opened the journal and looked down at the first blank page that greeted her; its lines were spread thinly and evenly across the otherwise unmarred sheets of paper.

Glancing around the empty arcade, she closed the book and picked it up, slipping it in her coat pocket as if it was a small bag of cocaine in the police station.

Walking into the backroom, she decided she was going to make her first entry. As she took a seat on the old mattress, the open book set on her lap, she was confronted only by the blankness of her writer's block.

(there will be more written in actual journal form, but this post is just a starter for that.)