deception

In the darkness of the black night, a sliver of moon for my only companion, and my mind freed of my otherwise vigilant self, wanders to places I would rather not go to.

I am alone. Alone in the places the past is taking me, I'm traveling to destinations that are long forgotten, dusty and relegated to some dark and dingy corner of my thoughts, they don't exist anymore, did they ever?

I am happy. Or I think I am, and what is the difference, who knows? Time is vague, as it always is when you do not think about happiness, when you do not question whether you are or are not happy. I look at myself and see a complete woman, if there is such a thing, that is. Then, as I look deeper, I see fissures, I see cracks, I see weak foundations. My life is not what I have made it to be, it is a farce, I am running form myself, trying to escape from my own conscience, it's disturbing questions, it's ever finger pointing on what I have become, what I have given up to be where I am.

I am a lie. I am not what I have set out to be, I am a fake, a farce. I pretend that I am living the way that I want to, but I know that to be treacherously a half-truth, I have enmeshed myself into a web of false pretenses, into hypocrisy, into just going with the flow. I don't want to ask myself what I am doing and why? because I know the answer and it is one that I am not ready to accept and face up to.

For years I put on a cloak of pretense, I think that if I believe hard and act then I might become the part, that all would become as in my mind's eye, and as long as I can turn my face away from the deception game I'm playing it will somehow magically transform into reality.

I had an image of a life that I ought to have been living, that I expected of myself to be living, and I believed others expected me to be having. I was a happy prosperous wife, a doting mother, a successful career woman, I had a beautiful home ( and if I didn't then I must have all these accoutrements) If I lacked something then it was my perception of the lack and not the actual missing of some vital part. Oh, God, Oh God, how did I lie to myself, and if in a melancholic rupture I would come face to face with the dark foreboding restlessness festering in me, I would run, I would want to do away with it, I would convince myself with logical logic that what I felt was illogical! Oh how I made a fool of myself.

Oh, how cruel we are to ourselves, what lengths we go to, what efforts we put in to build illusions, to build a house of cards, to conjure up dreams, that we know deep within us to be fallacious, to be phony, to be delusive. Why did I not have the courage to face my demons? to ask myself of what it is that was lacking? to question? Why and for whom did I live an erroneous life day after day? was it for me?

I always had myself on the outside, as an onlooker, witnessing the drama, watching it at all times and trying to direct it as close to how I wanted it played out! Oh God how malevolent it sounds now, as though I tried to control and direct my own life like that of a puppet, but then that is what I did, for years on. I kept pulling my own strings.