My fic writing brain is trying so hard. It's just confused about point of view.
You keep your skin on the outside. You hold your back straight, your head high. A mannequin of self-assured cockiness. Underneath, it's all maggots and shit. Mounds of it. You're filled up to the brim with it.
Beneath your skin, you are quaking.
In there is an impossible snarl of hurt so deep, you can't bear to touch it. Can't even think about it, lest it come spewing out onto your tongue and past your teeth. Once it reaches there, you can never call it back. So you keep it all in. Lock it up tight.
You stay on the surface. You focus on the skin. As healthy and water-tight as you can fake it. You make it laugh and joke. You are the star in a surreal puppet show. You perform.
Every move you make is forced. The days seem longer, silence swallowing the minutes in slow motion.
You can't hold it in much longer.
Hand to mouth, the steel chill of your ring against your lip - as if the motion could hold back something as inevitable as the tide. You try to cage an unpredictable beast.
You know he is already gone.
You feel sick to think about it. But this revelation was not an explosion. You watched your life dissolve into a slow-burn catastrophe in high definition. Traceable in every disagreement, bellowing loud in every secret kept, promise broken.
Big and slow. The winding down of a clock. The funeral pyre of a holocaust.
You push the shoulders back. You turn up your corners.
Then you go back in for more.
You can't relax when his eyes are on you. Those fucking puppy eyes.
You know he wants to talk from the lines around his eyes. You can see the need in the slump of his shoulders and the restless way his foot writhes against the carpet.
He wants to apologize for being honest (for once). But you cant.
Not if you want to keep it all in.
If you think about the words or the chasm that sits between the two of you, you will open your mouth and vomit something atrocious and devastating.
It will destroy you.
Hell would be a better fate.
No. You won't let him talk about this one.
You make a joke. You laugh. You tell him you're okay, you both are. You stay on the skin.
You're sure it's better this way.