Masquerade

Masquerade

Masquerade!
Paper faces on parade…
Hide your face, so the world will never find you…
Masquerade!

Most of the time I feel like a puzzle that hasn’t been assembled correctly, as if whoever put me together became frustrated with a handful of pieces that wouldn’t fit, and wedged them together at random with an angry fist. Then, after a time laying forgotten and collecting dust, a cruel and unfamiliar hand swept this lopsided puzzle off the table top.
How long ago did I shatter on the concrete?

Eye of gold, thigh of blue
True is false, who is who?
Masquerade!
You can fool any friend who ever knew you!

Masks are very convenient. I’m ashamed that my pieces were broken on the ground and fallen into muddy puddles, but the edges of my gold and glittering mask melted over my skin to hide the bends, the tears, and the stains, and gave me a healthy faux glow.

Every face a different shade…

But that shimmer was only for others. I’ve always known the real face underneath, and alone without my mask I needed to find ways to fool myself, to trick myself into not feeling the nakedness of my own bare features.
Substances that eventually cause cancer are likely to help: alcohol makes you forget, and nicotine relaxes every part of your body. I used to smoke all of my cigarettes to the bone, until the filter was burning and my eyes stung from the veins of noxious chemicals curling up around my face. It was for that drunken tingle that starts behind the eyes. Every burning drag spread it, until my entire body was numb, and the pain that was always tearing at the borders of my mind was reduced, if only momentarily, to a small faraway ache.
Inhale…exhale…be completely numb…
What was it like to feel? Oh god…it was like drowning. You can tread water and keep your head above the surface for a time, but eventually muscles and lungs will fail you. Once you fall under, the you that you knew is gone, and your leaden bones are heavy, and difficult to draw back up. Of course there will be passerby who look at you strangely while you’re silently flailing your arms and wonder why you don’t just cry for help silly girl? But the moment you cry out they shun your insanity and roll their eyes while you slip under and your lungs begin to burn.
Then what was it like to deaden the senses? What was it like to be numb? It was safety. You see, when you are alive, the world is a place built of broken glass that will lacerate you face and shred your fingers to ribbons if you dare to touch any of it.

Masquerade!
Seething shadows breathing lies…
Leering satyrs, peering eyes…

If I accidentally weakened and let myself feel something, I felt ugly. Repulsive. And for a long time I thought feeling numb was beautiful; alcohol, cigarettes, anything to dull the pain beneath my shimmering, happy, straight A student’s mask. For a long time I thought feeling numb was beautiful, and so for a long time I was alone inside of myself, although always physically surrounded by people, and I felt nothing.
When I was eighteen, my grandmother died from an aneurysm in her stomach that had been there for years. Her death wasn’t necessarily shocking, or sudden. For a long while before she died we had all known that it would be just a matter of time. The funeral itself was entirely too clichéd: The cemetery was tinted misty green with moss and wet weather. It was unpleasantly cold and raining, and everyone held a black umbrella; a cheerless and ugly black stain on the face of the perfectly manicured grass. The world through my eyes was lifeless and utterly dull, as if it had been set on a shelf for many years and the colors had all but faded away, that is, except for the roses held by each black gloved hand. They had somehow escaped time and remained neon bright in defiance of the dying world around them. I remember thinking how alien they looked in that place where I stood surrounded by the weeping faces of my family. I tried to feel something, anything. I tried to cry like I was supposed to, tried to manufacture tears and let them fall down to my toes, but my face remained cold and dampened only by rain. All I could think of was the vivid crimson roses…I caught myself absent-mindedly plucking the petals from my own rose as I was trying to manufacture some emotion. Looking at my damaged rose, I felt sorry for spoiling it, and continued plucking its lovely petals... And closing my eyes, all I could see was static.

Masquerade!
Look around, there’s another mask behind you!
Green and black, queen and priest, trace of rogue,
Face of beast…

Feeling static is much worse than feeling nothing at all, because static is the beginning of feeling life again, and it comes when you finally recognize you are out of tune. During the months of my numbness, I could ignore my pain and wear my mask with ease, but when the static came, it was constantly there staring me in the face and laughing at how screwed up I was. I tried in vain to starve it away, but with every pound lost, the static just became louder until my shoulder blades were sharp enough to cut glass and my head was furiously buzzing with the cursed white snow. I tried to purge it out by inviting the static to fill me up. I sipped it casually, I cut it into tiny pieces and nibbled for hours, I grabbed it with bare hands and gorged myself on it.
I used my fingers to forcefully expel it.
The static went away…The static went away, and I gave it any remaining pieces of my spirit. Things were finally silent, and I was left a gaunt shell. My father told me I looked like I was about to die.
Good.
Swollen glands and purple eyes, aching joints and countable ribs, fingernails thinner than paper; were my rewards for the return of numbness and silence inside, and when I finally gave up, my bones sunk like lead to the hard bottom of the water I had been drowning in for such a long time.

Masquerade!
Run and hide – but a face will still pursue you!

How did you save me, you, whose face I have yet to see? How could you, when my inwards were still quiet, and with a hand smaller than my smallest fingernail reach down through the black water and draw me up? How could you, when your lungs have yet to taste the air, breathe the life so forcefully back into me? How could you, with your eyes yet closed, open mine to the vivid and twisting colors of sunlight again?
The static is still there in my head, but so quickly changed. The black and white snow with its buzzing is already a seemingly distant memory, and now I feel instead the iridescent flutter of somersaulting butterflies inside of me. 
So what is it like to feel? Oh god…it’s like flying. The air is buoyant and you are graceful with a lithe body and flushed ethereal heart. There are no bonds to chafe your wrists and chain your ankles, and the affectionate breeze is soothing to the naked skin.
My father told me I look beautiful.
Good. 
                                               
Drink it in, drink it up,
Till you’ve drowned,
In the light,
In the sound…
















Note: all bits in the bold font are lyrics from the song “Masquerade” in “The Phantom of the Opera”