I’m here, hidden by the veil of myself, another self, not the one you know, but the one you expect and respect and reject so easily. Can you see me? Behind this carefully practiced act I hide in fear, terrified of being discovered, yearning to be released, to be me, myself, the true self; ages denied and bleeding, suffering an ache of loss for a life never allowed, never known, never spoken. I tremble on the brink of a discovery, of an acceptance, of a pain so great as to bring a death to truth and the birth of the lie that is so honest as to be my soul, my meaning, my epiphany. Forever hiding in myself, I long for nothing but to be seen, understood for the child that I was, the woman that could have been if I had not been murdered in my past by a life not offered, stolen, given freely to another. The death of my refuge is the path to awareness, to something so vast as to swallow all realization of fear, and yet I fail; in anticipation of victory I fall, rising from the light into the scared darkness of my death, drowning in the reality of my illusion. The veil will not rise. My heart shudders in emptiness, bereft of the solace that true illusion might give, I sink into the comforting pain of loss once more, so near, so dear, forever beyond imagining; my hope for the end of me hidden once more in my gruesome past of troubled childhood playmates, pain and death and self-hate. I am invisible in my shadows, standing in the light of a soul-less day, lost to all sight in the truth of the self that is forever denied by the living.

I’m here. Can you see me?

© 2015 by Zoé Grey

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