Title: Bittersweet life.

Continuity: Anytime between 'The Merger' (Season Three's 8th episode) and 'Travelling Salesmen' (Season Three's 13rd episode.)

Song: 'Brick by boring brick', by Paramore.

Feedback: Of course, reviews are highly appreciated.

Warning/Comments: Slightly A/U. Pam-centric. This one it's divided, just as the previous chapter. There is a fragment of a song first. Then there are three sections (they're all narrated on the third person): the top one and the bottom one are somehow the explanation to the middle one (which represents Pam's process of denial.) I hope you like it. If you do, it might mean that having a very bad day (which includes not eating for hours and staying late in school for a stupid, unnecessary meeting) it's the right method to push my mind to focus and my fingers to write. We'll see. XD Tell me what you think.

She lives in a fairy tale; somewhere too far for us to find.
Forgotten the taste and smell of the world that she's left behind.

Being forced to learn how to live without him was hard enough, but having to forget about him when he was right there? Simply excruciating. Consequently, her mind developed a self-defense mechanism. Reality was too hard to accept, so she went into denial, which made her numb. But then denial became unsustainable, and reality attacked her again, biting her and not letting go, like a shark. When the pain too hard to bear, she went into denial again.

It was an endless vicious circle; she'd gotten herself into it, and now she didn't know how to get out.

It was an endless, crazy vicious circle: it started when a fact of reality was too hard to accept, and it ended when she settled for standing that fact, as a thorn in her side.

It was an endless, crazy, unhealthy vicious circle: reality, pain, denial, pain, reality, denial…

And that endless, crazy, unhealthy vicious circle was her life.

Seeing them together doesn't bother her at all.

She doesn't envy Karen.

She doesn't hate her.

She doesn't hate herself as well for being a coward unable of fighting for what she wants.

She doesn't want or love Jim.

She doesn't feel like her heart is torn to pieces beyond repair every time she thinks about them as a couple, every time she thinks of him moving on.

She doesn't feel invisible all the time.

She doesn't think that if she disappeared from the face of the Earth no one would notice.

She doesn't feel like her life is completely empty.

His indifference doesn't feel like a knife cutting her to the very core.

She does not desperately want his forgiveness and love.

It's not like being forced to settle for not having him is the hardest thing she'd ever had to do.

It's not like she has never had so much trouble remembering why she has to get up in the mornings.

It's not like she's willing to do anything in order to have him back.

Sometimes she wondered how she managed to carry on living the way she did when she felt like everything in her life was either a lie or depended on one. Only the fact of her existence escaped from her spiral of lies and denial, because pain remembered her that she was alive; but she figured that, at some point, routine and acceptance would defeat denial and surrender would follow. Then she would lose all hope and that would be it.

Denial was a poison. But since it made her forget about her empty life, it tasted sweet; so she gave in to denial.

Even when she knew how bitter was the taste of the pain that came right after.