"You Thought You Knew"
Author's Note: This story is a little different and strays from the show a little (non-canon) and I didn't mention any characters specifically because I want you to have the ability to use your imagination and picture whoever you wanted to, I want this piece to be relatable. I know it's going to be different, but I hope you all enjoy it anyway. This story isn't what I normally publish, but I wrote it to deal with some things in my life and figured it was poetic enough to post. I hope you all don't totally hate it, but here it is anyway.
Do you ever feel like you are outside of your life, fighting time? Struggling with the hands on the clock to get time to reverse, to pause, or maybe even stop just for a moment? Just to catch up with the world around you, the world that is leaving you behind. To catch up to the life that you feel so disconnected to at the moment, the one that can't possibly be happening while you are on the outside watching every detail but not feeling anything, or feeling too much.
You thought you knew every feeling in the book. You have felt happiness, joy, and amazement. You have felt sadness, angst, and hopelessness. Betrayal. Love. Fear.
But you have never felt like this.
This is a feeling that you never thought could exist. You feel it deep within every part of your body, right down to your soul. It is a feeling that rocks you to your core. A feeling that you wish you never had to experience. One you wish you could forget.
It makes your head spin and you aren't sure of anything. Time isn't real and you are living in between days. Are you even living anymore or is this a dream? Some kind of twisted dream that you can't escape from.
Shattered. Helpless. Broken into a million shards that you are unable to put together, struggling to not drop any of the pieces. That's how you are feeling and yet that emotion doesn't seem strong enough to capture all of it.
Empty. You also feel empty, there is nothing left inside of you, hollow.
You thought you knew. You did know.
You can prepare yourself for something like this, you were prepared. But you never really are prepared, you can't be. You can educate yourself all you want. You can think you are prepared for any situation life throws at you, but never once in your life could you have prepared yourself to hear those words. Those words that crush you before you even heard them spoken.
You never really heard them at all. But you knew, at least you thought you knew. But there is a big difference between hearing them and thinking you've heard them.
You aren't sure what you heard, the words were flying through your ears so fast and your mind stopped processing the moment you realized what you had just been told. Time stood still in that moment. Everything moved in slow motion, your body reacted before your mind could finish understanding.
You were washed over with waves of nausea and despair. The anger followed later, much later.
The instinct of denial kicked in, but it wasn't quite strong enough to block the feelings coursing through your body.
You were in a haze. Words were fogged over and your vision centered straight ahead trying not to look disturbed, blurred by the involuntary tears running down your face. All chances of focusing were thrown out the window, your mind had a million things running through it, questions that needed answers, overwhelming emotions and imagination taking over.
You thought you knew. You thought you were prepared. You are prepared until it happens to someone you know. You could never have prepared yourself for how you are feeling right now.
It's tearing you apart. You don't know what to do, you aren't sure you can do anything. You don't trust your body to move, you sense that it would fail if you tried, so you don't try. You just sit there and stare, not even trying to contain the storm that is brewing inside of your heart.
It's a storm that brews for days, one that seems impossible to put out. You aren't sure you want to put it out, but it's preventing you from living, it has spread from your heart to the rest of your body, to your soul. It's consuming your every thought, slowly taking over your life.
You do nothing. You don't leave your bed for two days, and when you do, you are sitting on your floor staring at the nothingness around you, the images in your head too loud to deal with.
Numb, you want to feel numb.
You drink. That's something you haven't done in a while, but you know it will give you the desired result you are looking for. You may feel sorry about it later, but right now you have other things to feel sorry about.
The Vodka burned as it went down your throat, and you woke up with a weak voice, weak like how the rest of you feels at the moment. But you only felt numb enough to get some uninterrupted sleep, it wasn't enough to make the undesired feelings and thoughts go away completely, just enough to stiffen the headache building in your head. You feel more empty than you did before, if that is possible.
Now you have time to think, thinking always stirs up more conflict. Conflict you are already feeling inside.
You are angry at yourself that you didn't see the signs, catch the remarks, or notice the shift in the air that you so clearly see now. Every little thing makes sense now, it was all in the detail. How can you do this for your career when you can't even see it in a person you know everything about? A person you trust your life with. A person who is basically your family.
You thought you knew, but you didn't.
So many questions that you need answers to, so many questions that you never will get closure for. You don't know anything...
Which, actually feels worse than knowing the truth because your brain and imagination have been playing scenarios over and over, each time getting worse, and you don't know what to believe since you don't know the truth.
You don't know how you are supposed to act in this situation, what you are supposed to feel, but you do know that you never want to feel it again. So you start to rebuild the wall around your heart, place your guard up once more, and prepare yourself for the next thing life has to throw at you.
It sucks to feel the pain of something that you will never get closure to, but you don't know what's worse, the pain itself or trying to accept the fact that you never will get closure.
You thought you knew, but you didn't. You know now, but it's too late.
Author's note: Thank you for reading until the end, I hope you liked it. I realize after I wrote the whole thing, this story has several messages in it, several interpretations, and I think that's why it is so open-ended. I didn't intend for it to work out that way, I wrote this specific to one event I experienced, but I imagine that several of you can relate to the story each in your own way. I think that is why it turned out so good. Leave a review and tell me what you thought about it since it is so different from what I normally post, I'm curious to know your thoughts.
