Imagine My Surprise

Imagine My Surprise
ANONYMOUS MOVING IMAGES

I head outside to smoke a cigarette. I'm sitting on my white chair. You can hear thunder off in the distance. I look over to my right. And sitting there is a kid. A young girl. I say to her "Kid, what are you doing?" And she says "I was waiting on you." And I say "What for?"

Imagine My Surprise
when I found out that...

The people I trusted most knew all along.

Silence can hide more than lies.

Some doors only open from the outside.

The ending had already been decided.

The past wasn’t finished with me.

Everyone was performing for everyone else.

I had become exactly what I feared.
What I hated.

I used to think surprise came all at once.
Like a door kicked open.
Like bad news in the middle of the night.
But real surprise is slower than that.
Quieter.
It waits.

You build your life around certain people.
Certain memories.
Certain explanations.
You repeat them so often they begin to sound permanent.
Safe.

Then one day something shifts.
A look lasts too long.
A sentence suddenly means something else.
And the pieces no longer fit together the way they used to.

Imagine my surprise when I realized they already knew.
Knew what was happening.
Knew what I was becoming.
Maybe even knew how it would end.
And still, nobody said a word.

I kept thinking I was moving forward.
But the past has a long memory.
It follows softly.
Patiently.
You don’t notice the performance at first.
Everybody smiling at the right time.
Everybody reading from invisible pages.
Telling each other what they need to hear.

I thought I was different.
I thought awareness could save me.
Imagine my surprise when I saw all of this clearly for the first time.

Imagine my surprise when I found out she was my daughter.

The End.
For now.

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