The unrelenting squeal of an ended phone call came in vicious waves as I sat there, too paralyzed to put the phone down, but not strong enough to disconnect from the tones.

Tears ran in heats down my cheeks, racing each other to see how quickly they might reach the ground. I couldn't believe it. I didn't believe it. She couldn't have walked away so easily.

Shocking me back to life, the phone dropped onto the plush beige carpet, bouncing slightly before becoming still. I tried to focus on something; anything other than the blurred windshield my vision had become.

'How can you call someone your soul sister, promise them you'll never leave and that they'll always be your best friend, just to leave them behind?' My thoughts fogged my mind, omnipresent, only parting for the thunderous shaking, barrelling through my chest.

It's not fair. It never was fair. I was expected to never breathe without her consent, but if I asked for her time, the third world war was bound to erupt and spread into the nations of once shared allies, friends even.

I was alone. The fear of losing her came from a fear of not being capable of finding myself without her by my side, an arm's length away. Subconsciously, I extended my arms, hoping my fingertips might brush against the ghost of what once was. How could I live five years of my life as Anna's best friend, and suddenly, unexpectedly become Anna's nothing? How do astronauts adjust back into the atmosphere? When you've spent so long in the desert, you seem to forget the feeling of a hurricane.

In a thousand pieces on the floor of my bedroom laid my shattered heart. I'd never been the type to soak in my sorrows, to remain there for an unhealthy amount of time. I felt my body continue to shake, but no tears came. Their reservoir had run dry, but the lightning bolts of betrayal still hit just as hard, each flickering, luminescent memory sending an electrifying quake from my heart to the tips of my fingers.

I felt time lapse, constantly pausing, rewinding, fast-forwarding and playing. My mind became, in varying speeds, a rerun of my life's show.

The ache began to numb, despite my still shaky demeanor. I stood silently from the spot I never processed that I'd fallen to. With warm fronts and cold fronts, days passed.

Weeks passed, but tattooed unforgivingly on my mind was Anna, our memories and my memories of her.

I went to work as a hollow stack of bones, draped over with peachy fabric and sewn together with the lace of uncertainty. My heart remained on the floor of my bedroom, seemingly irreparable and starting to miss its essential parts.

As I walked out of the rustic and almost hipster coffee shop I called my second home, I paced toward my car, willingly sliding into the suffocatingly hot air. Apron still in tact, I pulled my phone away from its gentle canopy, hidden inside the extra piece of green fabric I carried.

Ramona, a name I hadn't seen in a while sat above a silently beckoning text message notification. As I debated with myself over opening it, another text from her joined the company of the first.

I let my thumbprint sit over the sensor for a moment before I clicked down my home button. I skimmed past the first paragraph which explained loosely put together details of how she heard of my blindside. The last message was what drew my attention however, words lit up on my screen that read, Can I come see you???.

I typed back a quick Sure before I drove home, blaring a genre of music I hadn't listened to in the last five years. Six weeks after the winds of the storm first hit, someone finally stepped into the disarray to make sure I reappeared a survivor.

Was the eye of the storm here, or was it finally over? If I had learned anything from science class, it's that the second half of the storm always trumped the first half in damages.

I reached my gravelly, worn down driveway moments before Ramona did, yet we exitted our driver's seat at the same time.

She crashed into me like tsunamis on an unsuspecting shore, almost knocking me to the floor.

"CAL, you could've called me. I would've been here sooner. No one had even talked to Anna until last night," she informed me, every syllable as genuine as only Ramona could be.

I nodded as the beginnings of a gentle drizzle prepared in the corners of my eyes. Sitting in my driveway, Ramona and I slowly broke down the solid concrete-like barricade that I'd built up to dam the rivers of tears, only to find the seemingly next quadrant of the summer's fiercest natural disaster.

I sobbed again, but instead of finding myself alone as a shaky, insecure pile of debris left behind from a brutally unrelenting windstorm, I found aid. I found the lifeline that could save me from drowning in my tears.

Anna was everything. She knew what made me tick and knew how to discern the perfectly imperfect coding that wrote out each of my actions. She had me memorized and could recite me, front and back, like the alphabet, but quicker.

But even as I misinterpreted the predictions of where the storm would make its landfall, I found assistance after all the lights withdrew to the shadows and all connection seemed impossible to regain.

But then it occurred to me, smaller storms can get caught in the eye, trapped until the constricting bands release the helpless clouds back into the atmosphere.

More weeks, more of a Ramona and I. The worst hurricanes come in late August, strengthened by heated waters and the breath of life.

Unassumingly so, I pulled into my designated school parking spot, waiting for the text that Ramona was there as well, a grande cold brew in hand. A familiar bass line played from the car next to me, earning a brief glance from my consistently dark eyes.

Red. Bright cherry red.

The color of Anna's Ford Focus. No I'd definitely not be watching Anna and her moron of a boyfriend every day for my senior year. I'd made it two and a half months without her, my first day at the top of the social ladder was not going to start by witnessing her hold on to everything she left me for.

My mother's worn down voice rang in my ears gently. Her tone was one of warning, but nothing the citizens of my mind took seriously, staying rooted in their homes as the storm brewed overhead. 'Wish no poor will against anyone, Callia Marie. For the will you wish poorly upon someone else, surely will return in an unforgiving manner against its speaker.' I could see the pursed lips and wrinkled forehead behind the words, acting as a messenger from the generations of women before her, each teaching their daughters the same code of conduct.

My palms brought me back from the daydream, sharply hitting the top of my steering wheel, my mind screaming the same pain-stricken curses my voice did.

Anna was gone.

Her world was turning, sun was shining down on the paradise she'd created for herself, the same paradise which labeled me untouchable and sectioned me off, clearly out of sight. I should be happy for her.

And here I was, clouded by my relentless anger. Something about the harshness of a door slamming next to me, drew my eyes back to the fiery color of her car to see her boyfriend storming away, clutching his fist. Anna's eyes, usually bluer than still Carribean waters were duller now.

A beautifully inconvenient time to realize she'd made a fatal mistake. As much as I knew I should be suppressing it, keeping my reaction to myself, I laughed. A cruelly executed smile traced my lips, and before a moment had passed, I buried my face in my hands.

Sitting back against my seat, I looked forward, over the field behind my school, simply enjoying the cloudless sunrise.

It was never my prerogative to laugh at someone else's pain, but surviving your storms can change you. Few things remained the same after a Category 5 Hurricane Anna blew through my life.

There should have been no survivors, a simple death count of one.

My entire internal radar may be presenting false truths, but looking up to the deeply tainted morning sky, and then to the broken girl on my right, I would go as far as to believe that the storm had moved on past my borders and set its sights on surging another's life with the floods of an unforgiving season.