In Limbo
She hated being one of those women. The women that live their lives without thinking, just enjoying the moments without realizing what's missing, and end up crumpled on the floor in a drunken heap in the end. Or in her case, become an emotional mess crumpled under Mark.
She had prided herself on her intelligence. She thought obsessively about everything else- but not him. She had trusted him; had assumed that in their many years together he still loved her and that when he said he'd try again it was genuinely possible for his heart to do so.
She'd lost him to his work, to Meredith, and to himself. In every way possible he was no longer hers and she was suspended in limbo. Looking back was easier than reaching forward. Feeling pain easier than being hopeful, simpler than faking optimism. She didn't want him back. Our emotions can only get thrashed so many times before we break and we are numb to every subsequent blow.
In those minutes she watched him in sitting despairingly in the hall, next to Mark of all people, she should have known that her life was to come down to this. A grand love, of true perpetual devotion, and she wasn't even on the losing side, she didn't have a side. She was simply floating endlessly in limbo- envious of what others had, incapable of trusting herself to find it.
She'd told Mark that he had sixty days. He'd agreed and she'd dismissed him. He'd told her that he had felt those tender feelings for her and she didn't believe him. She'd told herself that Mark was incapable of those feelings. Already feeling like damaged goods, she didn't want to be hurt again. Yet it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mark had proved her wrong. It was she who was weak and vulnerable and emotionally unyielding. It was she who was suspended hopelessly in limbo. Mark had gone those sixty days, in fact he had gone seventy-two. On day fifty-eight when he ended up dejected at a bar because she wasn't celebrating his accomplishments at commitment, he'd found someone else; a woman who he wanted to treat honorably and had gotten two weeks of committed celibacy from him without a bribe. It had cemented her stance as the outsider looking in, a doctor with the ability to cure who could not even being to heal herself.
She went to work each day as an observer of the joy of others… the juvenile interns who had indefinite possibilities before them yet seemed secure and stood firm… the men who had once cherished her but had easily gone on… the expecting patients and soon-to-be fathers with the futures in their eyes. Every minute felt as if it would bring about a breakdown and every smile sent her way a shot to the heart.
There was only one person who was able to reach her and he was the one from whom she most hid. He made her feel as if the veil of intelligence, of independence, of superiority she kept cast about herself was the sham it really was. Each time he saw through her pretenses, she suppressed herself more- and yet, a tiny trickle of hope would drizzle down to warm her heart. If there was anyone who could set her straight, who could take her by the hand and tell her that she was worthy of all that it was possible to give another person, who could reach up to her seize her heart, it was him- one of those headstrong, quixotic interns she secretly loved- Alex Karev. Only he could whisk her away from her state of perpetual limbo.