The Truth

'I want to be honest', I tell him, 'But honestly, I think I'm too scared.'

'What's so scary about the...' he starts, 'Oh.'


And then he gets it. It's the giving, giving, giving so much of yourself away, threaded throughout the words that we write, tangled between characters, scents, faces, achings. My skin stretched over the sky, the wind is my heartbeat. I feel like I cut out parts of my life and cover everyone I know with the pages my words fill. But still, it's a false ceiling, a veil to hide everything that goes on beneath my skin.


I'm afraid, I guess, like we all are, that one day someone will see the blood pulsing underneath this fine skin of fiction that I drape about myself, and realise that I'm alive. Because then it's real. Then it's breakable, tangible, then this honesty will drip from my fingertips and fill the room, for the fickle entertainment of whoever so wishes to glance down upon, to seek and find what they wish. And I'm not sure I'm ready for that. 


Because the truth, it brings me to my knees and forces me to crawl from room to room, pulling me down with its weight. It fills up every empty corner and bounces off my cluttered walls, hitting me squarely in the chest when I'm not looking. It hangs like a veil over each doorway, dousing me with the smell of the people I so desperately miss, with the way that one persons skin felt against mine, with the warmth of their hands that I'm trying to forget, and the way that they could capture the stars.


And all the adults in this world have spent hours trying to teach me all of this. "The real world", they call it. But I spend hours each day, squeezing beneath the weight of all the things I'm scared to let others see. Edging around the honesty that I am real, I am alive.


So I lie awake at night with the weight of the world resting on my lungs, and the pictures I wish I could share dancing before my eyes, and even my bedsheets seem to weigh me down with the truth I cannot share and I'm not too sure how it all got this way but I'm learning to live with it.
My heart is becoming a haven for every feeling I try to suppress, every part of life, of honesty, every memory I try to forget, and I'll tell you that no matter what I do, it's still getting pretty crowded in here.


So I leave the house. I escape to another world, I talk about others. My words wrap themselves like wedding bands around their lives, but the bands become the dust of Saturns rings and the truth, which I try so carefully to hide amongst their flotsam and jetsam, cuts like a knife through everything I use to conceal. 


And that scares me. That I could let someone see me, with all these cuts and bruises, with this blood my heart beats pulsing in and out of my skin.
Because I forget that the blood that races through the white water of my veins has fallen from the mountaintops that are so high they can almost touch eternity, that the same dust that made the stars is a part of me. 


And I wonder when I'll learn.