Hearing my own voice opens crevices in my brain. Staring into the mirror, my face pressed up against the glass, I wonder whom it is I see before me. I do not know her. She is too sad. Too low. Too timid to live, to be happy. Her eyes plead me to try. They look familiar, but they know more now. They have learned the evil that lives within people.

The black make-up, six days old I believe, (I have lost count) sits rotting on my face. My hair is thick and tossed around by the way I turn in my sleep. My skin, a new shade of pale. I sware I am see through. I wish I was. It would be easier to tell what is going on in my head that way. Maybe someone could see the pain in there. Maybe they could help.

I lay everywhere. I lay and I think. I think about how it is possible that people can be so cruel. I am yet to find an answer, even a hint. I lay in bed. On the floor. In the smallest spaces I can find to crawl in to be alone, where the pain that echoes throughout the world cannot reach me.

The warm water in the shower runs down my face. I feel every drop. I feel and it hurts. The pain lets me know I am here. I am here and I am so blessed. But still it hurts, and it does not stop hurting. I sink down and lay, once again, on the cold bottom of the bathtub. The water pelts me, I mistake it as stones threatening to break through my skin. I wish they would. I do not think it would hurt. Not compared to the hurt that pounds in my head, that cuts every cell inside my body.

Sometimes the sadness will leave me. Sometimes I am free and feel alive. Surrounded by nature and good people. Laughter, love, youth, and bravery. But when I am alone at night, I wake up. And I stare out the window. And I try to cry, but no tears seep out of my poor worn eyes. I just sit and I feel. I feel so much. I fear my heart will cave in, my lungs explode, and my body collapse and disappear. The feelings, the longing, the “whys” take over. No other thoughts are welcome now. Just the throbbing questions, the mysterious misery.

At times, I do not know why I am sad, why the pain hits me when I least expect it. I fear the pain, but I fear it leaving me. It is what I know. I am used to it. Smiling seems unnatural. Laughter feels like a stranger creeping out of my throat.

I am accustomed to being angry. Being upset about situations I cannot control. Disgusted with how I act because of the way I want others to view me. Disgusted at the way I watch people I care about do the same. But I do not do anything. I lay and rethink everything when I should have thought about it before I did it. Yet I don’t want to think. I want to live and have everything just work out. My thoughts contradict each other. If I cannot even agree with myself, be happy in my own skin, how can I be happy around others. See some sense in their way of thought?

I cannot be real with anyone. I cannot let this side of me out. It would scare them. It would scare me even more. So I tackle this alone, the act of being sad. It is an experience I feel I have to be alone for. So that when I am happy, I will be able to pretend it never happened. No one will be able to remind me of my old ways. I fear they would take me back to this time I am trying so hard to escape from.

But then again, there might be no escape.