Cut marks started to appear on Beca's left arm around the time when she began to refuse food. For every fight that her parents engaged in, every insult that was maliciously thrown across the room, and every tear that ran down her mother's face as her father walked out the door, a shallow and neat line was traced across Beca's wrist. She lost her bright, bubbly outlook on life and took on a cynical approach to every situation, the strong walls she built up acting as her only defense to the cruel loneliness she was subject to.

The cutting began as her own silent cry for help, an experiment to see if anyone would notice, if anyone cared, if anyone was there looking out for her. Along the way, they morphed into her way of punishing herself, for not being good enough, not good enough for her father, not for him to stick around for, not in the end.

Nobody noticed, which was partly due to the fact that Beca's body language had shifted entirely so that her forearm was mostly hidden when she moved, and the way she donned tops of long sleeves on most occasions.

Nobody was aware of her pain, which seemingly made it worse.

She felt like such a loser to be like this, constantly craving attention but shutting out anyone who offered it to her, but she couldn't help it. She'd started along a very dark trail in her life, one to be navigated alone, and with each step taken; it was made a multitude harder to turn back.

So Beca, at the ripe young age of fourteen, lost her glow, that one that was always the first thing people would notice about her when she was younger. It was replaced with the shadow of her old personality, her bright grins lost to exasperated scowls and half smirks. Her innocence waned away at an alarmingly fast speed, and with it her weight began to drop.

As anorexia, a product of the depression, crept along swiftly until it was menacingly threatening Beca's health and creating noticeable differences in the already tiny girl, her mother finally spoke up.

"Honey." She said one day as they were picking at sandwiches at the kitchen table. Beca's eyes shot up to stare at her mother. It was the first time her mom had spoken to her in two months, having collapsed into a state of her own depression with the departure of her husband, a kind of stupor where there was no reality and no dreams, everything surreal and she was living on autopilot. "I'm so sorry I haven't…. been here for you. I can't tell how much it hurts me that I've slipped away when you needed me most. I…. I don't know how I ended up this way." Her voice faltered on the last word, breaking with the strain of her composure. The façade that she had donned momentarily came crumbling down and she broke, collapsing into sobs. Beca longed to run away as she watched her mother cry, she wanted to run to her room and make another addition to the artwork of scars on her arm, because here she was, feeling broken and alone and like a piece of shit again. And here she was, again, helpless and unable to do anything but watch her mother fall to pieces. But instead, she stood up and wrapped her arms around her mother.

"Mom. It's ok, you don't have to." Beca whispered, tears streaking down her face at the sight of her mother's.

"No. I really do need to say this. This is unhealthy. We've been here, not really living, just co-existing. We need to live, Becs. We need to laugh and cry and sing and dance and smile like we used to. We need to be a family. You need to stop…. Stop hurting yourself. I'm so sorry, so incredibly fucking sorry that you've been doing that, but just stop. Come back to me, Beca. I need you to come back to me, and I'll try like hell to come back to you, and maybe together we can try to work our way back to some faint trace of happiness."

Beca began to slowly make her long trek back, but here's the thing about the place she was in. It takes so much longer to get out of then it does to enter, and it was more than a year before she felt like she resembled her old self again, and another three months on top of that before she felt like she was strong again, not the weak person she'd been drowning in.

Her mother didn't back out on her promise, and together they both tried, coming out of it closer than ever, but of course never really the same, because you can fix something that was broken but it will still always bear the signs of its abuse.

Beca turned to music as an outlet for her emotions, instead of her own body, and started to experiment with tracks and harmonies to mix together wonderful melodies.

Her first successful mix was a mash up of Coldplay's 'Fix You' and the Beatles' 'Here Comes the Sun'. She made it for her mom, a message of her love and hope for the future.

Her mom had always been her biggest fan, telling all her friends about Beca's wonderful talent, even before Beca had even figured out what a BPM was. She always offered creative critiques and much of Beca's style as an artist resonated from her mother's careful help and patient listening to five different remixes of one song at a time to help Beca choose the best layering.

They'd often spend rainy afternoons sprawled out on the floor of the lounge room with their extensive collection of CD's, imaginatively cooking up outrageous ideas for Beca's next song, laughing and smiling and singing together, like they'd always wanted to.

And one day, Beca woke up, and she knew that she and her mother had made it through, helped each other and were on the other side. She was sixteen at the time. She celebrated this realization with of course another mix, a collaboration of her mom's favorites that seamlessly expressed the joy she felt. Her mother cried when she heard it, and told her daughter that she understood perfectly.

Beca's mom was her one solid in life, and she was her person. They watched Grey's Anatomy together on Friday nights and ate Chinese on their porch as they watched the fireworks at New Years together every year. They sang through the dishes every night and danced around the kitchen, and teased each other's crazy morning hair each day. They had movie nights twice a month, whenever her mom could get off work, and always bickered playfully over who got to choose. Her mom brought her joy and was a light to ignite her fire, a thing that had been out for so long that she hadn't been sure would even relight in the beginning.

When Beca was eighteen, the single worst thing of her life occurred. It was worse than the pain of her parent's divorce. It hurt her more than a hundred of the cuts that still scarred her arms.

She had been preparing dinner for her mom, awaiting her arrival home from work one night when the phone rang. She picked it up and was greeted by a grim toned police officer.

"Am I speaking with a Beca Mitchell?" He asked carefully.

"Yes."

"Ms. Mitchell, I'm very sorry to inform you that there's been an accident on the corner of the Taco Bell. Your mother was involved in a head on collision with a semi truck and there were no survivors, but I need you to come over and examine the body to make sure she's correctly identified."

That was the night that Beca's world collapsed. Again.

But this time she couldn't see herself ever coming back.

A year went by, the heroine of our story in a downward spiral. It was like she was fourteen again, except she didn't have her mom to pull her out of it this time. Various tattoos were etched into her skin within this period. A cricket. For the times she and her mother had spent lying on the floor together, the comfortable silences bringing them closer as they listened to the crickets outside calling to one another in the night. The flowers on her shoulder were for the day when she and her mother both finally felt like they could breathe again, the day when Beca made the second significant mix. Her mother wanted to celebrate, so she went to the markets and got the flowers. She arranged them carefully in a vase on the table and they served as a reminder of the two's newfound happiness whenever seen.

She also had a sentenced inked into the middle of her back. It read, "I am titanium," as the song had been a favorite for her and her mom to perform together.

By the time her father cajoled her into receiving "a higher education" as he so fondly called it (a fucking waste of time had been Beca's choice name for it), she was lost to a deep haze.

Her life was a dark night, a burnt out light bulb. She didn't find joy in any of the little things anymore. And there were no big things to give her happiness either.

She'd gone back to doing what her mother had initially described as "just existing". And that was what hurt her most. She was back in the hell that they'd both worked so hard to escape. And the worst thing of all- she couldn't remember the last time she'd sung, or danced, or smiled, or really laughed, the full bellied type of laugh that brings tears to one's eyes.