Porcelain Mask

Flawless features,

Perfect expression.

Never a crack to be seen.

He questions that serenity,

Wonders at the lingering legacy,

Of horrors unknown in her history.

Looking close,

But not too close,

He tries to find,

The secrets buried in her mind.

A question,

That’s what he asks.

But the expression is unchanged.

Perhaps in her eyes?

A hint,

A whisper,

A ghost among the dead?

Her answer is steady,

Leaking through a million tiny cracks he cannot see.

Time is spent,

In earnest contemplation,

In learning her secret ways,

The million methods used to say,

All that cannot be uttered.

Time to strengthen their connection.

Beauty in that expression,

Carefully crafted ego,

Artful bravado.

Designed to conquer the world,

Damned to frozen perfection.

He sees the cracks then,

As their journey brings them closer,

Friendship blossoms as she speaks,

As they share,

Things he never had dared,

To dream before could belong to him.

But as they grow,

As he learns,

The cracks reveal themselves.

In their own time,

One

Then two

Three and more.

Tiny cracks

Old wounds.

Fissures and shatterings,

Evidence of her long, stony road.

Cracks carefully repaired,

Painstakingly filled and patched and smoothed,

Set back in place.

Kintsugi lines of gleaming gold,

In her porcelain mask

Behind which her eyes gleam with joyful mischief

Eyes in which he can see the terrible cost of gold.

-0-

Dearest audience,

My words in your head are something of a clairaudience

Tortured rhymes notwithstanding

I've a quest that's most demanding

My thanks is offered

I hope you'll take what is proffered

For reading this repost of mine

Barely remembered I'd written it in time.