A/N: Hello again! Just some E/O fan-fic…I thought of this while listening to "Split Screen Sadness" by John Mayer (if you're a ballad junkie like me, check out that song). I guess it's in Liv's POV… I sort of was just feeling a little solemn and this came out. Oneshot for now, might be more. Enjoy.
It was as if air wasn't an option. Like the oxygen she released every single day wasn't working, and for a moment, she choked on the layer of atmosphere around her. She couldn't believe—she didn't believe in what was happening around her. Nothing was true, it couldn't be.
It was as if her nightmares had taken a wrong turn, and became her reality. The things that came up in her dreams were now happening in that exact moment in time, and before she could figure how to save herself, she would always wake up. But she was awake, and this was real, and this was really happening.
It was as if every logical thought and theory that was in the world had never really existed. In that moment in time, she fully believed, with all of her heart, that people could come back to life. That her mom couldn't have hit her—that her mom was too nice for that. That the man she loved, the one she spent every single day with and she loved with every fiber and cell in her body, wasn't married to someone else.
It was if her world wasn't crashing to the ground and burning, being scattered various places. Like she wasn't watching it die, everything she had delicately built up and put together now ripping itself apart with the least of decency. That the comfort zone around her that she had inhabited and loved for so long was now gone, and it left her with the equivalence of being naked in a crowd.
But everyone knew that "if's" were just figments of one's imagination, that the only conjunctions that shocked people back into reality were "ands" and "buts". "If's" were the words that people used to cling onto that last piece of fantasy, where nothing real ever existed, and only an endless flow of brilliant possibilities were held.
She liked to avoid the word; she thought it obsolete when it meant that nothing truly existed. Although she also disliked the word "or", she would substitute it; at least it remained in contact with the real world.
She had once been asked if she had ever let herself go, ever do things she wouldn't dare imagine, not care about the consequences. "No," she had responded, poignantly blunt, "I keep myself in check." But now she began to wonder, as her life burned to the ground, as she stared at the limp body of a man she once loved and would give anything for, what if?
Simply, straight-forward.
What if?