Masks

So I donned the mask. A whirl of colours, sounds, people, noise. The noise blasting into my eardrums, deafening. I talked until I was talked out, then I retreated into the toilets and locked myself in a cubicle. I sat there, safely enclosed within four walls, and stared at the time on my iphone as the minutes slowly ticked past. One minute, two minutes, three. How long could I get away with waiting here until my absence was noticed? When I deemed I had waited for as long as I dared, I reluctantly left the cubicle and re-emerged into the melee.

I felt people’s eyes on my face and back as I walked as nonchalantly as I could back into the gossiping crowd. Too long. I had waited too long and people had noticed. But nobody commented. I assume social niceties forbid making remarks about extended restroom breaks.

The mask was firmly in place (for those uninitiated, it’s most commonly referred to as a ‘social mask’), and I was putting on a great show, but inside things were rapidly deteriorating.  As I talked animatedly at the dinner table, turning my head rapidly from person to person and keeping my expression lively, smiling, and bright, I felt my visual surroundings beginning to blur a little as the edges of sound overlapped like tiny waves lapping gently at an inlet shore.

The conversations were moving faster now, and I could no longer keep track of what was being said. The individual words and their meaning were lost amid the roar of noise and music surrounding me. I kept the appropriate pattern of expressions in place (my most successful social mask – an elaborate construction of years of social lessons learned the hard way and careful observation) but I retreated from the fray and took up the role of interested listener.

The next part is confused. I remember talking to my parents and them telling me to go outside for a break.  I remember the sudden release of inner constraints. I remember sitting on a couch in the foyer staring blankly at the wall opposite while a group of ladies with a baby in a pram kept glancing curiously across at me. The rest is irrelevant.

Later that night, I was back – with a vengeance. I hadn’t intended to dance; keeping it calm and lingering on the border being my game plan, but events and my own outgoing social mask conspired against me and soon I was up on the dance floor rocking it with the best of them, doing things I didn’t think were possible for me to be doing with the knowledge I held inside of me.

Incompatibility. What was I drawing on now, when there were no reserves left? I didn’t want to know, but at the same time I knew that I had done this many times in the past, and perhaps today I was finally paying a price stacked too high against me. A precarious tower of cards finally crumbling and crashing to the ground.

While I was dancing I was blazing on the outside, but inside I felt nothing, like the numbness of an anesthetised wound. Like in the high point of a fever, where your cheeks are burning and your eyes are overbright.

I did my part, I played my role. But I paid for it the next day, and I’m still paying the insurmountable debt of three years of parties and social events, three years of intense social masking, three years of the sort of raging popularity and social highs I craved so desperately as an alienated child, three years of a life that could not be sustained. The price? My life as I knew it. The scales are equalled and balance is restored to a universe I never belonged in anyway.