Renewal

Short Story - under 750 words.

When you hide your emotions from those around you, then you cease to behave as the real you. Instead, you become the version of yourself that can survive, within the projection of bullshit that you’ve spun. People will tolerate you, but they won’t like it. They will sense that there is something, at the very least, that is unsaid. They may be happy to skirt around that for the sake of peace, but they know it’s lurking there. It will silently annoy them. Sometimes it’s staring out of your eyes when you haven’t got the wherewithal to guard against it with your usual vacant pretence. They will spot that look and realise that you’ve let your veil slip and that there is a sadness, no, much more, a truth there, that they hadn’t seen. The good news is they’re unlikely to mention it because it’s easier.

You may become very adept at self-managing and look very busy getting on with things, and you will complain about setbacks and make a great deal of small successes, and these are all parts of the same act. It takes effort to perform at this constant, sub-mediocre level. To call it a lie is problematic. It’s not blatant enough for that, it comes under the heading of a lie which is unspoken, or hard to explain at all, living in a way which seems bearable, but emotionally, it isn’t. You’re not saying it because of your fear of speaking at all, so you’re just living it, quietly, which is essentially the same and not so easily exposed as a blatant untruth.

I know that sometimes, even you allow a few moments of indulgence. You might close your eyes swiftly, and admit a daydream at the very back of your perception, or as you drift off at night, you allow a secret stiletto of true feeling to pass across your mind which is almost orgasmic because it will hover there until you wake, stirring you to force a brief smile, before you slip back on the mask and go back to the half-life. The tragedy is that you’re hiding those feelings until it becomes a habit. You get into a ludicrous routine where you almost convince yourself that the façade is in fact, the truth. That works until it hits you. When you have no warning you hear a song, watch something, hear a story on the radio, hear a string of utterances from someone, said in a familiar order, and in seconds you are transported back to a time where you lived within the raw fear of total truth. Part of you doesn’t want to remember because if you do then it means it must have been real. That admission would make carrying on all the harder. You should be grateful for those memories. Things you said and did with total conviction. That showed you who you really were. But any concept of honesty, within the context of something very dishonest, was never an option for you. You weren’t brave by any means, but you were certainly a little more courageous. More than now.

You will carry on with your performance. Until when? Most likely when the decision is made for you by someone who realises and is shocked by another, perhaps final, falsehood. Thankfully, that will never happen, so just lower yourself into the new role and shrug off the chance. You’ll enjoy letting the detachment game become the new reality, that’s not so hard, is it? Time is the useful healer, each second or minute onward, sealing more of the wound. It’s also the paid-for whore, used in the way you choose, so you can lie to time whenever it suits. I think you can stand it because it’s not so bad to live well in the meantime, albeit in pain.

The renewal of our lives was once going to be ours. I understand that outcome would have been so much worse for you, than this. Instead, the renewal is solely yours, and as long as you can remember to keep hidden that dying look behind your eyes, then you can have that clean new life for as long as you want. One day, seventeen years from now, beyond any concept of knowing, we will both look up at a far horizon as the sun sledges away, and wonder if our eyes ever again, expressed true happiness.