Pieces of the Present - [Danona] Book Two ✓

02. barely holding on

November 8th. That was when she had clutched the little plastic stick between her shaking fingers. She had felt nothing. She had felt everything. Not a single emotion known to mankind hadn't crossed her. 

How was it possible? No, not that. How could she have been sitting with the incredible view of Santorini outside of her window and still managed to feel her world crumbling around her? Exploding, she thinks. That was what her world was doing; exploding. It was almost as if she had been stuck in the middle of a battlefield. Debris and dirt floating around her as everything exploded, yet she was only sitting on her hotel bed. The building hadn't collapsed, the world hadn't been the victim of a nuclear attack; it was only her.

All of the dust and rubble that was surrounding her, it was surrounding only her. 

How could it possibly be? How could singular lives explode like landmines, all while others stayed completely still? No change for them. No dramatic shifts of the way time ticked away. Nothing. They kept walking, they kept breathing, they kept living. But her life had stopped. Just stopped. 

That was what she had felt the moment she had seen those stupid blue lines appear. Like everything had just shattered, right then and there. 

It had taken a moment for the panic to set in. Maybe the speed of her reaction seemed slower than it did in real-time. Everything felt slower now. It had felt like the emotions had taken 5 years to make their shift through her head; when in all reality, it had only taken but five seconds. 

How was it possible that two little lines on a stick could cause an earthquake? A tornado and a hurricane, a tsunami, and a volcanic eruption. How could that possibly be? How could something so simple, just two fucking lines as thin as a strand of hair cause all of that?

She was asking the wrong questions. She was asking the wrong questions to avoid asking the right questions. Those ones were much harder to answer. 

The right questions took time and thought to answer. She knew that she would have to ask herself the answers to those questions eventually. Questions like 'what the hell am I going to do?', except her mind was blank. She couldn't pour as much philosophy and thought into finding those answers while her mind was still numb. 

Eventually, it wouldn't just be herself asking those questions. It would be her parents and her friends and her doctors. It would be everyone. Yet, she wouldn't have the answers. 

Eventually was now. Time was up. She had pushed it off for as long as possible, yet the words had finally spilled out over the dinner table like a glass of spilled milk. 

"I'm pregnant."

Just like her hotel room had exploded when she saw those positive lines, the clattering of silverware had the same effect. More debris, more dirt and dust filling the air only she breathed in. It was a hallucination only she could see. It was her life that had come crashing down.