You can't go back

You know how sometimes you know something in your gut, you're sure of it but it's never really been spoken so you convince yourself that you're imagining it?  You talk yourself down off the ledge because clearly, you are overreacting.  You have no proof of this thing.  Your gut must be wrong.  You move on with your day brushing aside that nagging feeling each time that it arises.  You refuse to react to something that hasn't even happened yet.

Then you find out that you weren't wrong.  That thing that you knew in your gut, that nagging feeling was a thousand percent accurate.  Your stomach pitches and you feel the bile rising up in your throat as you will yourself not to vomit.  All the air whooshes out of your lungs like a balloon that has just been deflated.  You want to breathe, you try to breathe in and out but your lungs are frozen in place with no oxygen in them.  Finally your brain connects with them and you gasp in big gulps of air as tears begin pouring down your face uncontrollably.  Reality slams into you like a mac truck.  You think it is going to kill you.  Why didn't it kill you?  You've just been run over; you should be flat as a pancake, feeling nothing.  But you're just a crumpled mess waiting for the next wave of reality to hit you again.  It is coming, the waves of knowledge wash over you again and again and you know that the old saying is true.  Ignorance is bliss.  You desperately wish to turn back time and return to that naivety.  But there is no going back.  There is only forward.

How do you move forward?  An impossibly thick fog has settled over the road in front of you and the ground has shifted.  The path that seemed so clear a few moments ago is dark and hazy.  You can't see which direction is smooth and which ends in a cliff.  Is there even a smooth path there anymore?

If you can find the will to forge on, how do you begin to find your way again?  Do you even try to see what the right direction is?  Or do you just stumble forward, praying that if the cliff is what is up ahead, it finds you soon?