Diary of a Fake

Day 1

Use to be when I got depressed I’d eat a bunch of pills, drink my way to the bottom of a bottle, engage in high risk behavior and rampant sexual deviancy.

Now I just pretend nothings wrong. People talk to me more. They like being around me. I go places, hang out, do things.

I’m still hurt, but no one can see it. They don’t have to pretend to care. All it took to be okay, was to hide that I’m not okay.

Day 4

Now I’m included. Standing in a room full of people, no one hears me scream. They all walk up, hands out stretched with pleasant, welcoming faces. They think I’m smiling back, that’s just how I grit my teeth when the salt hits the wound, but I know if I don’t say anything about that scar running across my soul they won’t notice. They’ll think I’m smiling back.

A pseudo something to fake someones.

Day 5

Like a cancer twisting and spreading, my mask grows ever larger as I laugh with everyone. I don’t know why I’m laughing, but they all seem happy. This is the correct response. I’ll learn and evolve, and hide behind this marionette.

Day 12

It seems the more I wear this mask, the more I grow to hate it. They don’t look at me, they don’t hear me, they don’t know what I know. I used to walk around art exhibits, exploring the alternate universes of the creatively gifted. Now I’m standing at a mall watching girls try on pants that cost a third of my weekly paycheck.

We skip from store to store, arms locked. We smile, we laugh, we skip. My persona stays firm in it’s pretentious allure. One of the girls asks if I like the darker pair, does it make her butt look cute. She has a cute butt to begin with. They’re just pants, who cares, as long as they’re comfortable and plain. I lie I tell her I prefer the faded pair with the tattered seems and frayed knees. Makes her ass stand out and virtually no muffin top. Her posterior would make jogging pants provocative. She buys them with a cute smile plastered across her face. She doesn’t take her eyes off me the entire purchase.

I’m liked and she doesn’t even know me. She wouldn’t want to know me. She likes the puppet before her, dressed in slacks and a white button up precariously blow open, revealing my gray wife beater which accents my well sculpted abs and chiseled chest. Another piece of armour I throw in place for protection. Another me that isn’t me. A beautiful coat of paint hiding a rusted shit box.

We skip to the food court, bags draped from our arms. They sit in a small booth and have me order the pizza, they don’t offer money. My mask stays in place, it’s lashed on. I smile and nod, I get drinks even though they didn’t ask. We eat, we laugh, a porn star couldn’t spot my lack of sincerity for the orgasm that was this moment.

Day 22

I’m invited all the time now. Included in everywhere the world goes. Like a package plan, buy the party, get a free amicable guest. The girl at the end of the bar, the one with the tight blue dress with the plunging collar and bare back has been eying me all night. I feel like crawling out of my skin, a sardine packed into this can of a social life. People walk up and greet me as if we’ve been friends for years. I smile and feign interest. The girl in the blue dress saunters up to me, she’s so short I have to lean down as she stands on her tip toes just to speak into my ear. The bar is loud. It’s always loud, always where everyone wants to be.

She wants to dance, I pull upon the strings. I’d rather be basking by the moonlight, shore side in the middle of the wilderness with music playing from an old reliable car. Perhaps a bottle of whiskey, maybe the company of a fairy tale to give the night mysticism. I read the wall, a small plaque demands me to dance as if no one is watching. I pull upon the strings. Here for your amusement, this jester will flail about for the fatuitious nobility.

She grinds close with her backside to my crotch, hands seductively running the length of her abdomen. I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know why I’m doing it. I feel myself letting go, indulging in this trance like state, anything to avoid dealing with what’s lurking beneath this facade. She must have enjoyed the play. Her dress was hung from my ceiling fan the next morning, her bare body stretched out across my bed.

Day 41

Used to be, I drank to be consumed. I wanted nothing more than a blurred oblivion. Every night I tucked myself into the very furthest reaches of every bottle, letting Jack, and Jose, and Karkov, and Jaeger sing me to sleep in the most violently absurd quartet. So many precious moments lost within a fog of seething self loathing and complete indifference to my own existence.

Now I drink with groups, we tackle bars in herds, piling into one car to bounce haphazardly from one hole in the wall to the next. We drink as if we are parched, born to a barren land in a perpetual drought. Our adventures so numerous it becomes a daunting task to keep track of the night, not because my mind is a haze of alcoholic fumes, rather to keep this charade going I must go beyond pretending to be what I am not. I have convinced myself some nights that I am indeed okay as we careen through the yards of the privileged, my head stuck through the sun roof blasting a banshee’s anathema at the top of my lungs.

A young fool with a Chestshire grin and a dagger up his sleeve is through the sunroof and atop the hood, feet planted firmly surfing the precarious road of life. The laughter so raucous and over the top, I catch myself in the rear view mirror long enough to snap back to reality. Everything about this night screams danger, everything about this night is a mere momentary distraction, moments without regret.

In this night I see the lie that is walking within me. The mask cracks, spider webbing from the eye. My smile doesn’t seem so perfect, my eyes not so radiant. I will maintain this image, I will be that pretty fake princess.

Day 73

Months have passed, I am still a delusion of self, wrapped in my cocoon of deceit. I am not happy, not warm, not ready to transform into a beautiful butterfly. Everyone smiles still, they all say hi. Ask how I’m doing and without a chance to reply they pat me on the back and tell me they know I’ll have a good time.

Day 82

Was it to my amusement to ignore you for a cheap trinket? Her eyes so flat and dull, unlike those that used to sparkle every time I brushed your hair back. This disguise is coming undone, the seams are tearing, the mask will never again be polished. I have to keep it together, I have to be so zen.

Day 84

I let someone in once, I took off this mask. So convinced she cared I decided I had to take the chance. She dances around the bars without concern, snapping photos for the moments no one can remember. She can’t be troubled to recall my name. I envy her so much. To never know what it’s like to be hurt by someone’s touch. She’s always there, in every moment, directing away. I became just another disposable portion of someone’s life. A cast off, not even regarded as a fond memory.

Day 94

Now this game is overplayed. I’m not sure when to smile or laugh. No ones calling, left to my own devices. I went at it alone, stepping through the door of the bar as every one leered at me. My mask is cracked in half, like a bilge pump all that rancid disgust and festering wounded pride is dumping out. They’re avoiding, the life of the party has died.

Day 95

So I drink, back into the bottle, back into the spot light of a train wreck. Lashing out at anyone who lays a finger on my shoulder. Slamming down vodka and whiskey and tequila and anything that will obscure my fallacy. Fancy that as I break down and reveal something real, everyone has departed. They’ve all found a new thrill, just as they always do. I’m sitting on a bar stool, dressed in rags with a broken mask bandaged to my face. Even in the indecency of my truth irony is not without it’s bitter humor. My side is poked by a boney finger, attached to a boney arm. A blonde skeleton stands to my side, wanting my attention. Out in the open, with no intent to hide, the one person to approach me is so oblivious to any form of reality that I am still fake even naked.

What do I care? They all run to moments, moments are so grand. Were they? All I can remember as I pry my eyes open the next morning was how demoralized I felt as I barreled repeatedly into this stick whore. Such disgust that I couldn’t bother to carry on, I shoved it all in her mouth, hoping to rip the corners. With every gasp of breath came a small gagging noise, my eyes were shut tight and my teeth were grinding to dust. In that moment every teenage boy yearns for my seed tore loose and filled her cheeks. She reeled back in shock and mortified horror. I didn’t even bother to ask her name, I threw her clothes down at her and told her to get out, shoving her through the doorway before shutting and locking my cell.

Day 97

The mask is broken. No one comes near. Every once in a while someone dares ask if I am okay. What am I supposed to say to them? All they want to hear is a yes, no matter how dark the circles of my socketed eyes are or the coarse grain of my week old stubble. I haven’t showered in three days, there’s dried blood on my shirt from the carvings in my chest. I’m okay. That’s all I ever say. That’s all they ever want to hear.

Day 101

Out of sight, out of mind. If they won’t believe my lies they’ll do the next best thing, ignore it all. I can read about their adventures the next day on a social site. Catch the latest gossip as I brood over shots in the waking hours. Everyone likes to tell me how amazing the previous night was, I don’t ever remember our exploits being affectionately referred to as amazing. Maybe when I stood arms locked with them singing drunken lullabies as we pranced down main street St. Patrick’s Day.

Day 110

The mask hangs above the closet now. I consider hanging myself beside it. Played like a pawn, thrown away on a gambit. The players advance, the pieces sit and collect dust. I don’t play pretend anymore. I was a momentary distraction to kill the colder season’s idle time.

I walk by the bar, always peering through the windows. There they sit, in booths, on stools, grins from ear to ear, still laughing, regaled by tales of seasons past. The boys want the girls. The girls want the boys. They all want moment after moment, to hell with the consequences and especially the fallen. This show isn’t for the faint, there is no room for anything beyond a blink.

Day 111

I sit now, pouty, pissed. Ashamed, humiliated. Everyone knows where I went, everyone gets to giggle at the fool. They all know the story, how the little boy with a mask tried to blend in. I was their amusement, but even that notoriety has passed.

Now I’m a figment, some fractured memory that’s scarcely recalled. Another nothing in a recycled world. I lament my attempts to be okay, for in trying to be okay I discovered that I am truly not. Worse yet, this damage is of no concern to anyone but me. Not only does the world wish to never glance upon my scowl, not only is my absence unnoticed, but I fear even in death I’ll be forgotten.

Day 112

I’ll never know if I was missed. I won’t know anything past these words. While everyone’s partnered in crime, kissing and fucking, grinding and dancing, smiling and laughing, I’m sitting here with a gun in my mouth and a tear in my eye. When everyone asks why? When everyone says they always thought I was okay, this is my proof. This is my proof to a world that doesn’t give a shit about anyone, that no one gives a shit about you. We’re all expendable and when the birds chirp and you awake to sun beaming across your face, the taste of cheap liquor still lingering in your mouth like the toy you took home the night before is still lingering in your bed, when you turn on the local news and they talk about the youth who shot himself the night before, I won’t even be a name that makes a connection.