It was a cold day. Adrienne clutched her coat around her body and adjusted the shoulder strap of her comfortable leather messenger bag. Most people have messenger bags made out of canvas, or vinyl. Never leather. Leather is a heavy material. It's hardly ever used for messenger bags, because the weight, in addition to whatever it is carrying, is a huge load on a person's shoulder. Leather is also easily scratched. It doesn't look good for very long, before it starts looking very old and beat. After a while though, after it's been worn and softened, after the stiff leather has been broken in by countless hours of holding objects and bumping into walls and tables, the leather bag becomes comfortable. The leather becomes tanned and thin, less stiff. The scratches become buffed into a supple matte finish. The bag becomes a fixture. The bag becomes part of you, and you hardly realize it's there. Adrienne didn't even realize she was adjusting her bag. Her mind was too weighed down with her daily introspection to be concerned with the thirty pound weight hanging across her body.

"I've spent a lot of my life wondering what the heck I should do with my life. How lame is that? Shouldn't I be living my life? Doing stuff? Instead of wondering about what to do?"

Adrienne walked from her bus stop, continued down the street past the strip mall that she walks past every day, and entered her apartment building. Her keys jingled like tin cans as she dropped them back into the pit that is her leather bag. As soon as she dropped them though, Adrienne cursed to herself. "Fuck. I do that every day. I know I'll need my keys as soon as I get to my door, and I always drop them in my bag. Fuckity fuck." She swore even though it wasn't a huge inconvenience. Adrienne had done it dozens of times before, and she had cursed herself about it dozens of times before, but that didn't stop her hand from unconsciously dropping the keys in her bag before she got to her door. As she approached her door, her right hand instinctively slid into her bag, rummaged around until it found her keys and slid the key into the lock with a loud, jarring crunkle.

Adrienne's apartment was small, but it was perfect for her. As she entered, she dropped her bag onto the top of a small footstool just inside the door. It was the bag's home when it wasn't with her. She strode across the original hardwood floors, past her futon, through the french doors and into her bedroom. Built in the 1930's, the apartment building she lived in was nothing to look at from the outside. Stained brick and acid rain-erroded gargoyles crowned the top of the building like a black toupee on a red-faced man. Her apartment was a gem; a diamond in the rough. Actually, it was a diamond in the very rough. The neighborhood wasn't the safest place to live in, which is part of what made her apartment so affordable. Only five weeks ago, the convenience store where Adrienne buys her ice tea was held up buy a masked teenager. The kid made off with twenty dollars and a handfull of Airheads and Slim Jims. Her parents, Mumsy and Dadums as she so lovingly, sarcastically refered to them, were concerned about her living quarters. They said they were worried about her safety, but Adrienne believed they were more worried about the emergency credit card in her wallet that was tied to her parents' account. Her parents were also five hundered miles away, so who cared what the hell they thought. Mumsy and Dadums advised her to get some mace and a rape whistle. Since one cannot beat up an attacker with some travel-sized mace and a plastic whistle, Adrienne carried a pair of miniture nunchaku in her bag that she bought from a pawn shop two blocks away. She wasn't trained in the art of nunchaku, but when she felt the need to up the badass quotient in her life she spent time flailing them around like crazy. She wasn't afraid of the possibility of hurting herself with them. The nunchaku were made out of a hard plastic anyway. Any time she accidently whacked herself in the arm or back, it only left a small bruise, if any at all.

"What to do, what to do." Adrienne thought to herself as she threw off her jacket and shoes and flumped down on her bed. After class, there wasn't much. She laid in her bed feeling the cold air coming from the cracked window on her face and listening to the neighbors upstairs walk around their place. She didn't know what they were doing, but she did know that whatever it was, it required a lot of walking, because she could tell exactly where they were above her from every floor creak and step they made. She rolled to her side and clutched her pillow. She always slept with three pillows, one for her head and one on each side. It was like sleeping in a pillow boat. There's something confining and protective about sleeping with symbolic walls around a person. It's almost like having a fort or a castle. "Well, I could go see Jeremy. He's probably not doing anything." Jeremy was Adrienne's best friend. He didn't go to community college, like she did, but he knew what he wanted to do. What he wanted to do wasn't much, but at least it was something. Adrienne laid in bed, hugged her pillow to herself, pulled the covers over her body and closed her eyes. Half in a daze she pulled off her pants. Then she turned on her back, took a cleansing breath and let her hand find its way to its purchase. "Just a couple times, then I'll get up and get something done." Adrienne wasn't ashamed of pleasuring her self. She used to be, but she got over that very quickly. What's a girl who lives alone supposed to do to pass the time? Sew a quilt?

Wordcount: 1028
Note to self: What have I gotten myself into?