masquerade

Sometimes I think life is just a magnificent duplicitous masquerade; its participants nothing more than spirits prancing about in costumes of skin. Mayhap, all lives are just a Cinderella story with a not so happy ending. We raise our hopes and expectations only to find ourselves once again dejected and alone. Perhaps Hamlet sums it up the best when he says, "God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another," for we often trade masks to hide our intentions and ourselves. Laughing and chattering, many live factious lives, but often we hide our darker selves and cruel intentions, living in fear that we will be left alone. I frequently find myself wandering alone in my mind, exploring the depths of the deception I have unknowingly created. It is now an instantaneous reaction to hide my fears and sorrows, and to instead laugh and grin like a hollow jackal. My misery is mine alone. To let anyone in my dark world would most likely leave me in peril of myself. Instead, I am content to lick my own festering wounds, snarling at any who attempt to don the mask of a caring person and help me. Everyone in this world lives only in their own mind, and at times do reach out to help, but only if they receive something from it. The masquerade we dance in doesn't end at midnight, nor does it deign to give us a breathing rest, but instead whirls us around in patterns of confusion and the instinct to protect oneself, but the worst feeling of all, loneliness, spins a web of unbreakable threads trapping us in the fabric of abysmal solitude. Crouched in front of the door grasping at my hair, my head throbs with pain and self-deprecation. Self absorbed, I know, but it cannot be helped with stabs of wretched realizations pelt me like hail falling from the azure sky. Neither rain nor shine can lift me up from the gloomy existence that I, like all others, am forced to live. I slowly analyze each morbid realization and examine it like bacteria on a slide, feeling an urge to squash the struggling squirming germ. Bringing out the killer instinct, I slip on the mask of death, and slowly reach towards the defenseless organism, willing myself to let it all go and give in to the inevitable. My mask slowly slips off, leaving an exposed soul with no direction and no strength, a soul who had mistaken herself for something as insignificant and innocuous as a germ and was ready to exterminate it. This masquerade I'm forced to live, leaves me drained and forlorn. I will never be in charge of who I am or what I do for I am only a puppet, a dancer if you will, in a timeless dance where there is no beginning or end, perpetually trapped in a whirlwind of chaos and disaster, forsaken in this mutilated scarred skin.