Hey everyone, we're onto another story now. I don't want to give away too much, I just want you to read it :) Basically Alex is going through some hard times, so possible trigger warnings. I've rated it M because of the darker issues it deals with, don't worry there will be no swearing and no scenes of an explicit nature Enjoy :)
I do not own Modern Family or any of the characters affiliated with it.
Chapter 1
Alexinthymia: An inability to describe emotions in a verbal manner.
Alex swung her feet as she sat at the island counter, half listening to the conversation of her family, the other part of her mind caught up in the whirlwind of thoughts and emotions which were always clambering for attention. Hayley's laugh cut through the tangle of her thoughts, and she brought her attention back to the discussion for a second only to zone out yet again once she heard her telling their mum something about a dress she saw the other day. Her family had long ago come to terms with the fact that Alex didn't interact with them much albeit to make a small sarcastic comment every now and again, so they didn't think anything of it when Alex was sitting quietly while they joked and generally got along for a brief period of time.
She was thankful to be left to her own devices, being the only introvert in a family full of extroverts could be exhausting and there were times when she just wanted to escape the hustle and bustle of life in general. She wasn't exactly sure when life got so exhausting, but she was finding it harder and harder to get out of bed in the mornings, harder and harder to leave the sanctuary of her room. Alex sighed into her pancakes, and her mum looked up for a second, worry creasing her forehead. Their eyes met for a few seconds, Alex looking hopefully at her mum before Claire went back to scolding Luke for something he had done. Tears fought their way up, but Alex pushed them back angrily, she couldn't cry, she was always the strong one; it didn't matter that she felt weak, but she was the sane one in the family; if she fell apart the home would become a madhouse. Still, she would've loved her mum to ask if she was okay, to hold her, to something...
Even though it was her fault, she had pushed all of them away, made them feel unsafe to approach her or check on her, she still wished one of them would refuse to acknowledge her barriers, to stumble clumsily through them the way they stumbled through all aspects of life and just...well anything really. Yes she was cynical, yes she was smart, but sometimes she longed for human contact too. She had very little to discuss with her family, but her sarcastic comments, while taken as offence was actually her contribution to their conversations. She didn't mean to deride them, family was family, and there were times when she was truly appreciative of them, it was just...with a vocabulary like hers, Alex was amazed at her inability to put words to her feelings, but there was an ache, a longing for...something, anything. There just had to be more to life.
The outsider of the family, that was her role, she was the only one who wasn't funny or childish at times. She was the sane one, that's what she kept telling herself, but day by day she began to doubt that more; spending too much time inside your own head is a dangerous thing and the more she probed into the dark recesses, the more frightened she became. To express that fear to her family though, to express her feeling of loneliness, of yearning, of complete hopelessness, how could one even begin, there were simply no words in the English language to truly do justice to her feelings; simply no way of telling her parents without them freaking out and accusing her of saying it was their fault. Her parents weren't exactly the most stable, but Alex imagined that it was something that would make most parents would freak out. It's a hard thing to swallow when you know your child is broken and even worse when you don't have the power to fix them. How could she possibly deal with knowing that every time her parents were looking at her, they were accusing her for breaking up their perfect life, for having problems and not being the perfect child they were able to trot out to brag about? She wasn't sure if it would make things better or worse, all she knew was this state of mind was becoming unbearable; there was a scream inside her that just had to be let out otherwise it would reverberate inside the chasms of her mind forevermore, slowly knocking loose her sanity.
Alex pushed the pancakes idly around her plate with her fork, her stomach undulating too much to eat. She watched Luke as he enthusiastically discussed at length a stick he found the other day, why couldn't she be like that? Why couldn't she be struck by the smallest things? Alex had stopped sharing her successes with the family; they mostly related to her school work, and it was frustrating to see the blank looks on her parents face as they wondered if this was an achievement she was telling them about. She longed to tell them about the test she aced, she longed to share her frustration on being beat by Sanjay again, by one mark, and she longed just to discuss her day, how her teacher seemed to roll her eyes when Alex's hand shot into the air once again, how she had been called a nerd, yet again. There was just so much to say, so much that had been bottled up for so long. Yet there was a fear to release it, a fear that once unstoppered, the flood of emotions would never cease, perhaps it was better to keep adding everything to the bottle, to not feel, to not talk about it. Perhaps...
So this one was a little different from the last one, I'd love to hear what you thought :) Please leave a review down below. I'll see you all next Friday :)
