She stretched and refolded her legs slowly, careful not to let them reach out over the edge of the cliff. She always sat here; standing was a little too much to handle. The fight between her terror of heights and the primal urge telling her to jump made her ever so dizzy.

She looked at the papers in her hand. She had dug them out of the loft today and brought back a flood of memories that had been dammed at the back of her head for years. 'Kitty' was scrawled messily at the top corner. She had been so desperate to be called kitty as a child, too ashamed of her real name. Her snob name as others called it. A tear dropped from the end of her chin and plummeted to the frothy ocean below.

She remembered the favourite saying of her high school science teacher ' 'Every drop raises the ocean'. Kitty wondered whether she could flood some remote island somewhere if she cried enough. It felt as though the sea should be lapping at her heels as it were. She glanced at the papers again, lower down this time to the title. 'Life ain't easy, being young'

'HA!' It came out as harsh as a gunshot and startled a flock of birds from the cliff face to her left. She wanted to go back in time and give her young self a good sound slap. Tell her to flipping well grow up!

But then, no. Growing up was when the problems started, wasn't it? That loss of innocence was when it all began to go so horribly wrong. She started to read the first verse

'You see at home, they're always telling you what to do
And then at school, you're always beaten with the rules'

That stupid rebellious phase that seemed to be a rite of passage into adulthood. How she had hated being told what to do wherever she went, being treated like a clueless little child rather than the omniscient teenager she had supposed herself to be. Oh, how she longed for somebody, anybody to tell her what to do now, to tell her how to sort her life out and get it back to the dream she had always held. Another tear. She imagined a cow somewhere looking down and wondering why its feet were getting wet.

No, now she thought about it she would much rather go back in time and tell herself to savour every last second of her precious, precious childhood. She might even tell herself what a mess her life had become; perhaps then she could avoid it. Change her future. But this was stupid, as far as she knew nobody had managed to invent time travel yet so there was no point even contemplating it.

'Just let me get away from these life-restricting chains
Free to live my own life, free to feel my own pain'

What on earth had possessed her to write such senseless rubbish? She had felt her own pain alright, every kind of pain it was possible to feel and all because she had not listened to her parents. Of course she knew better than them, they were old and could clearly not remember as far back as their teens. They had never met Charlie anyway; they didn't know how wonderful and kind and caring and loving he was. What did they know about her life anyway?

Clearly an awful lot more than Kitty did herself. The strange thing was that the bruises and eventual broken bones were not what hurt the most; it was the realisation that Love was not the magical life-fixer she had read about. That happily ever after was just as impossible as it was desirable.

'It's my money and I'll spend it if I want to'

'Ha.' That one was more like a sob. Suddenly she tore the pages in half so violently she almost toppled herself over the edge. She stood and screamed over the sea 'You stupid, pathetic idiot! You spent your own money and now look at where it got you!!' She tore the paper again and again and flung it fiercely away from her. The breeze sent it in a spiralling dance on its way to the water below. Kitty watched it swirling down and felt the urge again to jump. To see how it felt, just for one second, to fly. She took a step closer to the edge and a flash of yellow by her foot caught her eye. It was a scrap of paper that had not made it to freedom.

'Life ain't easy b-'

Kitty bent down and flicked the paper over the edge, then turned and began to trudge home. Nope, life indeed was not easy. But you just had to get on with it, get a job and pay off the mountains of debt, get over the abusive rat who had shattered your dreams. It's not easy, but that's life.

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