When you sit down to lunch with all your laughing, talking, giggling friends, you feel as if you belong. It may not be spoken; yet underneath your smiles and beauty you are as lost as the next person, and you can't show it., can't feel it. You keep laughing, and you keep wearing that overused mask.
But look over to your left. Do you see that girl, sitting all by herself? She isn't the prettiest; she doesn't have the greatest hair or the prettiest complexion. Maybe she has bad breath, and she keeps her face close to the book that she holds so tightly. But for whatever reason, she is sitting alone. She isn't talking or laughing or giggling.
She tore her mask off a long time ago. Maybe she hasn't ever worn one. Her pain is exposed to a cold metal world and there's nothing to protect her from your glances and glares and words.There's nothing in between her and the rest of your kind, nothing but cold, slicing air.
And so she sits alone, alone in her pain. She doesn't talk, but she isn't stuck up, she doesn't believe she is important or good for not wearing that mask. She has a verylow self esteem; she believes your words even more than you do. She knows she is not pretty or funny; she knows she fumbles over her words. She is shy and scared of people like you, who wear such gaudy masks. She doesn't want to get in you way.
When you grow up, you will forget her. The rest of the world will forget her and she will be swallowed up, lost, confused. She has never been as protected as you, and she doesn't has the power to create a maskof her one, doesn't have the determination. No one has ever told her she could; but everyone has told her she couldn't. So she will collapse under the strain while you go on to live a happy life under your mask.
But, what if all it took to save her was a few words? A smile traded for your usual glares, a complement for an insult. Kndness for cruelty. If you could change one person's life, would you do it?
 Aira-Sinco · Sun May 27, 2007 @ 12:08pm · 0 Comments |
