There were too many confusing things in the world, some of which you can't comprehend no matter how hard you try, and some which will eventually make sense once you're given enough time. No matter how nice it would have been to think of the problems which had burst like a dam and drowned me weeks ago would eventually make sense, I knew the chances was higher that they wouldn't.
My thoughts and emotions were a rampant, never-ending storm inside my head, ones which refused to be calmed. It had been a few weeks, going on more than a month since I was forced to swallow the truth that my pack, that my entire family were murderers.
Chasing after the Rosewood pack and worrying about what happened to them in the years I had been separated from them was an ignorant, yet blissful, dream. The kind I would willingly force myself to go back to sleep and dream of again, rather than the ugly nightmare my reality actually was. Each day I continuously wondered and cursed them on why they could have massacred thousands of werewolves ate away at my sanity, further frayed the delicate strings of my emotions, and my grasp of reality.
Days passed seemingly in the blink of an eye as I secluded myself in my little home in the woods of the Alcatrozz mansion. The cottage was my mini reprieve, a way to get away from everyone else at the same time without actually going anywhere. Even if I had wanted to leave, I wouldn't have known where to go. The drive I had before to run away and interact with the world was gone.
There was no use moving past this nightmare which held me hostage in its arms, keeping me close to it that the past seemed like a sweetly distant dream.
In this dreadful haze which had enveloped me, my body felt numb, seemingly unreal as I drifted off and traversed the edge of nightmares and reality that had blurred so deeply together I couldn't tell which was which. Was I awake or floating on a chasm of emotions and relentless truth that refused to leave me alone?
If I don't move, could I drift back to that blissful dream where I didn't know anything? A flicker of hope flashed through the fatigue, making my lips twitch in delight at the thought that I could be ignorant again.
If I was still faithfully hopeful as I had been a few weeks ago, I might have even believed it. No one knew what could happen in the future because there were too many possibilities that could occur at a given moment. It was the words I lived by when I was looking for my pack, yet it was stupid of me to romanticize it and not fully consider the possibility that the worse could happen. And now that it had, the shock—I think this was shock, although with how mixed up my view of the world was, I couldn't really be sure—was too much for my own body to take.
As I continued sinking, drowning in this phantasm I had been living in, flashes of what I could only assume was reality, still penetrated through it occasionally. In it, I saw Elizabeth sitting beside me for hours, quietly talking about things which I had only caught snippets of but didn't really understood; Lilian kept bringing me food even if she had to force me to take small bites to fill the stomach I didn't know was grumbling in hunger in the first place.
Then there was Tate. The flashes of reality with him was somehow clearer, as if the nightmare's hold on me had deliberately loosened to make me surface back into the world when he was there. He talked for hours about anything he could think of, except for the topic of family he skillfully avoided. The clearest memory came when he mentioned an odd blue dress he had a hard time finding, for some reason I couldn't hear before the mist had pulled me under again.
It was safer there in the nightmare of a dream I had been living in where I wasn't forced to do anything. I could lie in wait forever until my emotions had subsided and the truth had long faded into the background that it wasn't significant anymore. I could ignore it and pretend I had spent my life chasing after them until finally giving up because they didn't exist—never existed in the first place. There was a knowledge inside me that was sure I would have been more capable dealing with that kind of truth rather than what I had been dished with.
