From New Moon (pages 356-357) — just before Bella decides to go cliff diving without Jacob:
The cliffs were a black knife edge against the livid sky. Staring at them, I remembered the day Jacob had told me about Sam and his “gang.” I thought of the boys-the werewolves-throwing themselves into the empty air. The image of falling, spiraling figures was still vivid in my mind. I imagined the utter freedom of the fall…I imagined the way Edward’s voice would have sounded in my head-furious, velvet, perfect…The burning in my chest flared agonizingly.
There had to be some way to quench it. The pain was growing more and more intolerable by the second. I glared at the cliffs and the crashing waves.
Well why not? Why not quench it right now?
Pressure-Released
by Larisa Dawn
As soon as the thought passed my consciousness, I felt guilty for it. Jacob and his friends — his brothers — were out there risking their lives to keep me safe from Victoria. True, they were also protecting their own families and other unsuspecting humans in the area, but they were taking extra precautions to keep me and Charlie under close watch.
Another, more distant, picture suddenly popped into my head. I was eleven years old. Renee had taken me to see the Phoenix symphony. A friend of hers with season tickets was unable to use them, so she had graciously accepted when they were offered to her. I smiled a little as I remembered how my mother was always trying to infuse culture into our lives on as low a budget as possible.
As we had approached the concert hall, a woman stepped out from a darkened door stoop and asked for money. Demanded it, really. In my eleven-year-old mind, I had not known how to describe the look in the woman’s eyes. Thinking of it now, I still couldn’t accurately define what I saw: desperation, yearning,… She had looked more like a rabid animal than feminine human. Renee had reached into her pocket and given the woman a five dollar bill. I had asked her, once safely inside the confines of the elegant hall and away from the frightening woman, what would make a person look and act like that. “I can’t know for certain honey, but I would imagine she is on drugs,” Renee had told me. She went on to explain to her wide-eyed preteen that some people can become so dependent on a drug that they no longer care about food, or other people, or themselves. “Be very careful around these people dear,” she had warned me. “They will do anything to get more of their drug, often hurting people around them in the process.”
Is that what I have become? A junkie! Am I willing to keep hurting myself just to hear the voice of the man who left me? I was appalled. That was exactly what I had been doing. How could I consider myself any better than an addict lurking in a doorway, begging passersby for help to get my fix? I was worse. There was no substance altering my mind; I was doing it all on my own.
I thought about the little pep talk Charlie had given me that day, a few months ago. The one that had made me start to emerge from my semi-comatose state. He had told me that he had been heartbroken when Renee left him and took me. There was no doubt in my mind that Charlie loved me. More than I probably loved myself at times. I felt the ripping feeling in my chest again, but it was a different sort of pain this time. I hugged my arms around myself in my usual gesture. I was feeling the same pain of my own loss, but I was thinking of Charlie. I guess I was trying to imagine what he had done to be able to continue living, because he had. And he continued loving. He loved me. Charlie had close friends, like Billy and Harry Clearwater. I realized, for the first time since he had left, that I felt a spark of hope. And I felt it on my own, without Jacob’s warming sun ability.
I stared out over the swirling water, watching it grow angrier and angrier as the storm inched closer. It was beginning to sprinkle a little, not at all unusual for Forks, but the drizzle carried the threat of more intensity to come. I stood, walked to the water’s edge and bent over to place my hands in, moving them gently back and forth. I watched my ripples collide with the raging waves and get swallowed up.
“I am not a junkie,” I told myself out loud, and with that proclamation, I vowed not to seek my hallucinations anymore. Edward himself had told me that he had wanted so badly to kill me when we first met. “You’re exactly my brand of heroine,” he had once said, but he had resisted the temptation knowing that by doing so, there would be better things to come. Those better things had not been long lived, but I liked to think that the time he spent with me was more enjoyable than the brief pleasure he would have had if he had succumbed to the lure and killed me. I didn’t allow myself to sink back into my personal abyss upon thinking his name. I had a choice. I could choose to move on.
I could do this. I knew that it would not be easy, nothing worth doing ever was. I owed it to Charlie to be the daughter he loved, not a shadow of her. I owed it to Jacob to be a true friend, not someone who convinced him to do dangerous things with me so I could hear a voice. I knew I had to tell Jacob, at some point, about why I had wanted to do those things, but that could wait. Most of all, I owed it to myself to live my life.
I squatted down, getting the toes of my boots in the water so I could continue to sway my hands. It felt soothing, like the storm itself was pulling out all of the tension that had built up inside of me to have more force to throw against the rocks. I figured those dark rocks had been weathering storms for thousands of years; the little bit of extra pressure from inside of my head shouldn’t do them any damage. It felt good to me to be rid of it. I looked out over the waves again. Something caught my eye off in the distance, distracting me from my thoughts. I could see something red but only when it reached the crest of a wave. I squinted trying to discern what I was actually seeing.
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May 15th, 2010 at 9:28 pm
Hi, it’s a bit offtopic but may I ask you where did you get this blog template? I’m going to start bloggin as well, I’m a bit noob though but I really like it
Let me know… Anyway, nice website! 
May 17th, 2010 at 4:40 am
The template was designed by Pamela Rice Hahn for “The Blue Rose Bouquet” at http://www.bluerosebouquet.com. Coding for the template was done by Eric Ehlers (http://thelemur.net/), credited as the “Code Monkey” at the bottom of this page.
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June 16th, 2010 at 3:21 am
A paragraph excerpt with a link back to the site would be permissible, but permission is not granted to post what you refer to as an “article” on your site. Each “article” is actually a chapter in the Twilight Saga/New Moon/Team Jacob-related fan fiction book “Phases of the Moon.”
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