Facade

She had convinced herself that day was like every other, aside from the growing anxiety regarding the situation she had been handling the past month. The sun came up that day, the moon bid goodbye, a dusky blue sky replaced the depth darks and twinkling stars, the lights of the city shut down, to busy morning sidewalks and streets. It was normal.

Be that as it may, there was a nagging at the back of her head, a pull to her distress. Calling herself paranoid, and convincing herself to her indifference, she drove on.

Turning at the curb, driving by the towering infrastructure the city provides, into the underground parking of an exceedingly familiar building, into her reserved slot. Locking the door as she got out. Lost in the never-ending webs in her mind, she hadn’t realized the mistaken weather report, with the sudden blur in the sky as the clouds started to gray and the thunderous boom that resounded, adrift in her own bearings of persuasion that nothing was truly wrong. Walking into the elevator, and as the doors shut and she finally looked up, it had long past her notice. The rain poured, and as quickly as it came, it had drenched entirely everything in its path, completely and fully, before she could become aware.

The weather was an ironic metaphor truly, undetermined as of yet and unexpected, but the change it brought was inevitable a natural occurrence. Even With the years put into its understanding, it will never be confounded knowledge, when exactly it would rain, when an earthquake would occur, merely its probability in our supposed grasp. Still, an imbalance, whether to or whether not and possibly maybe.

Truly similar to life and tragedy, an understood elision, wherein its shock hurts more than fear or pain, because things we fail to prepare for are what hurt us the most, and suffering somehow always has the element of surprise. She was all too familiar with that fact. The feeling of caged pain, a continuously hovering dark cloud, loose emotions, and a cold and detached aura. And yet that was the over-bared feeling that resounds, out figurative heart, still beating and broken, in shackles of its familiarity to hurt.

A familiarity long surpassed by time before she had begun to understand. The very same feeling encapsulated in her standing in the bleary white hallway, do better written out in one word to another, on glossy sheets of paper a feeling similar to mocking, haunts each step she takes in the circle round the same 12 tiles. And filtered out sounds, she vaguely recognizes echo through the unempty hallways, part of her thinks of the comparison to a sanatorium she’s more accustomed to; but that part recognizes she’s only deflecting as well, unhealthy, she should know. And she shouldn’t be standing there, not like this, not like this. There are stains on her arms, and splattered on her pants, dripping down the side of her head in red, but she chooses to deflect that as well. And there’s a throbbing, she’s sure she has a concussion even slight eternal bleeding most likely, but that’s not important now.

Shaking hands she visualizes, her voice the same through each subconscious given answer, the lights burn and the sounds make her head spin, but she remains to be a vision of unaffected; because she needs to know, and so she swerves away from the nurse calling her attention and follows the array of doctors and machines and bots, and each high wiring sound, and unintelligible chatter. Red, all she sees is red, she’s blinking. Red, all she knows is that it’s all red, and she feels like fainting. It's red and white and there are blotches of her blurry memory, riddled by her automatic reaction; it's all so red. Slashing that’s what she remembers, sounds, lights, her pain, she hurries on.

“She needs emergency surgery!” She overhears, from a white-coated fellow

She steps in “I have a copy of her Consent Directive, I’m listed as her second, I’ll sign it” She remembers holding out her wrist, to a bot and the following flurry of action.

Dark dirty wheels, squeak from the sudden movement, and she recognizes her own detachment from each slipping moment, the glimmer of the silver band on a deathly pale wrist slightly off the moving cot

She blinks, as the light stutters, and once again shakes herself away from the haze she lost herself in. And yet still finds herself lost in thought and slowly lapsing into one again, bittersweet feelings rise to the surface of her validating, so much for being alright again.

The question now, why was it that even through all the shattered glass, broken trusts, and countless tears cried, she was aghast when again she was left roll her tinted windows up, close the gateway to her castle walls, and her fears were out again.

Because that was the reality of Daphne Kingston, she thought, the reality of pain. Just watching and waiting, breaking and falling, standing by for when the light will finally break through again.

Earlier that same night, as she shook and screamed, she watched the light in her best friends eyes let out, she watched the blood ooze out of her head, the world spinning, she watched the glass shatter, car flip, and her world being slowly taken away from her, and she did everything she could do, screamed, called and cried, wavering visions blind her sight before the darkness took her, again.

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