This isn't technically a "What If?" situation, but I felt like it needed to be written. It's definitely bordering on an M rating for language and thematic content. Read at your own discretion.

I disclaim.

Alice found herself recently single. Again.

This one had been so nice, too. Too nice. Too good. No one could be so upright, have intentions that good. She couldn't let him hurt her, as he'd doubtless been planning, so she'd backed out. Classic case of what her mom called "Alicitis," and what a shrink would doubtless call "abandonment issues."

So, once again, Alice donned her skimpiest clothes—raspberry-colored skirt that barely covered her ass, deep blue halter that left bare a wide strip of toned stomach, and five-inch electric purple stilettos—dancing in the middle of the floor of a trashy club, her third (or fourth?) drink held high over her head, surrounded by people, dancing with no one, cold despite the heat of the bodies pressed in on all sides.

From an outsider's perspective, this dive appeared no different from any of the others in this, the shadiest part, of town. Alice chose it for her moments of escapism for one reason only: the part of the night dubbed "The Confessional."

The already-dim lights fade along with the music and, in the anonymity given by the near-pitch-darkness, people shout their secrets.

"I'm such a hypocrite."

"I hate myself for doing this every night, but I can't stop."

"I never enjoy sex with my boyfriend but he gives me expensive gifts when he has extra fun. I feel like a hooker."

"…I lied…"

"…I cheated…"

"…I love…I hate..."

On and on they go, sometimes shouted in drunken slurs, others in voices brimming with tears, still others in near-joyous exclamations. Some are inconsequential, some enigmatic, some tragic, but all contain a ring of truth, and through them, a picture of the darkest and brightest parts of human nature coalesces.

Alice never participated. She simply enjoyed the catharsis that came with hearing other people shout their secrets—her secrets, sometimes—it gave her a connection to the world she felt no where else.

Tonight, however, her confession pours out of her, and is lost in the darkness and the press of bodies, just another terrible truth, "I'm broken inside—a lost cause. Something's wrong with me—I want to let people in, but I can't. I'm a fucking zombie."

She expects an even deeper sense of the calm that always overtakes her at this time of the night. Instead, she reels at the truth of her statement, and retreats further into herself. Every hurtful thing anyone had ever said to her replays in her head, "frigid bitch," "stuck up," "unlovable," and she absorbs each one, accepting it as true.

She doesn't realize tears have pooled in her eyes until they pour down her face. Tears, not for the insults hurled at her, or for what's-his-name, or any of the now-nameless-and-faceless men who had come before him, but for the truth of her statement; she was broken. The place where love was supposed to go had gone, rotted away, decayed from too many years of darkness, the doors to her heart shut tight. She was irreparably damaged.

So Alice did the only thing she knew how. She danced harder and drank more, tears running down her face, pushing thought away, feeling more dead with every movement.

Hope you liked it. Till next time,
HeadPhones