Mask

I feel myself slipping.

 

My sanity is slipping away from me.

 

For the most part, I keep it all together. But then there is a trigger point, that it all just washes any rational behavior and thoughts away.

 

At the drop of a pen I am a wild animal yelling and pushing all those who love me or even care for me away. Suddenly, in my head I have all these newly minted memories in which they have all done harm to me in some way, and I feel as if I am finally sticking up for myself in some way. Then the anger subsides and those memories I realize were just fictional dreams.

 

I see the effect of my uncontrollable actions, which spins me lower and lower. The tears I cause. The unhappiness that I impose. All of it comes to be as a heavy guilt weighing me down lower and lower. I lose sight of the sun in the summer days. I see only the dark coffee willing me to have the energy to just get out of bed.

 

I think of a time when I had never been happier. A time that I was laughing. A time that I was crying from laughing. A time that I was actually smiling, genuinely smiling. I start to think why can’t I be in that happiness again? Why are those memories so distant? The real memories seem like the fictional dreams, not the other way around. How could it be possible that I was ever that happy?

 

No. I don’t keep it all together.

 

I stay in the middle. Away from the highs, away from the lows. The middle is what I let people see me as. Slowly I bring myself up out of the lowness that I have put myself in, and I cover up the guilt that I have made myself feel.

I put a mask on to cover all the emotions that I think that I am feeling, but are really just figments of my imagination.

The middle is my mask.