Writing this for an English as.signment that focuses on an 'every day hero'.  The examples given were the environment or some dragon, and it required added secondary characters.  I made the main character of the story having a hero of her own despair, which some can say doesn't really count as she didn't save anyone else but herself, but.  Some parts of it relate to things I've gone through, but not all.  Critique would be appreciated...I've written this on and off through the day, so it probably has a lot of errors.

 

 It's incomplete and I'm writing it out before typing out everything, so it's definitely far from done.

 

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   I used to think the war between us was more than a chance to prove I could beat my odds against the world.  Any glance taken the wrong way, any bump that wasn't even intentional- I took it all as a personal offense.  You can even say that my biggest flaw during that dark moment was that my strongest belief was that everyone was out to get me.  Nothing was left but a barren wasteland of what used to be and what could have been, the landscape for this fantasy 'war' I had created between myself and all of whom I knew.  It took a sluggishly slow seven months to realize I was wrong.  Society and all of its people were not my enemy.

  My own mind was.

 

  The brain has a very vital and useful ability, the said skill metaphorically being able to be represented by an iron box, where the key has vanished beyond mental awareness.  In the very heart and core of that box thrives memories too trivial to ever normally bring up again unless in the most specific of circumstances, and the traces of the darkest times in our lives that have traumatized us so much that our consciouses know better than to let it roam free, evading any moment of happiness it touches upon.  At the very least, the mind dulls the sharp edge of that horrible, nightmarish moment, tossing the slightest details possible into that box in order to lessen the intensity of it all.  That itself is a primal instinct- that moment will forever leave its imprint on you, while ensuring you are, for the most part, blissfully unaware.  Now say that the locked box breaks, unleashing an uncountable number of things that you'd never want to experience twice.  In that case, you can alwas say there is an unavoidable stream of history p*censored*ing before your vision, haunting every step you take, and dragging down every move you make.

 

  You can say that's what happened when I opened my eyes in the morning.  Where I expected clear, brilliantly blinding sunshine, there only existed a blurred glare of white and gold.  Tears, my grandfather used to tell me, were broken parts of your soul that have to be shed in order to continue living, lest they poison you further.  I always used to discard his words as the trivial rantings of an old man, and I found it funny when his exact words, long forgotten and locked away, emerged to the surface at that moment.  So there they were, salty, liquid, remnants of my 'soul', rolling from my eyes and down my reddened cheeks to be absorbed into a pillow that lately had been feeling more and more like a lumpy block of cheese.  I didn't know why they were even there, invading my vision, until I blinked.  In that quarter of a heartbeat where there should've been darkness, I saw a face that I hadn't seen so clearly in years.