You can't understand if you haven't felt it. It's a knife in your back, in your belly where it'll hurt the most before you die, and it twists and pulls as if it's alive. When it stabs you, you can't breathe. The pain washes over you and you see stars, feel hands around your throat, squeezing, until you realize your own sobs are choking you. Your vision clears and you look up, thinking, surely, surely someone will have noticed you there on the floor, writhing in pain...but you're still in your seat, and the other students are still writing, pens scratching, bleeding ink onto the page; blue, black, green.
You turn to the person next to you, tears of ice still running down your face...but she's still writing too, carrying on a daily chore while you, just two feet away, have died again.
You wipe your eyes on the sleeve of your coat, asking to be excused to go to the restroom. The teacher nods, keeping up pace with the lecture, not looking at you. She looks up, though, wondering; she knows you don't go to the school bathroom, that you hate the smells, the words written in nail polish on the stall doors, the soap dispensers that are always out.
You look at yourself in the bathroom mirror, splashing water onto your face and rubbing it off again with a paper towel, again and again, splash-rub, splash-rub, until there are no more towels and you are satisfied your mask is back on.
No one looks at you as you enter the classroom, soft as a mouse, clicking the door shut. You sit at your seat, right next to the door, and she looks at you, her mouth moving, and you realize she's asking if you're alright. For a moment you consider asking her why she cares, yelling at the top of your voice that no, everything is not alright...but she's too late. Someone nods, not you, but the person inside you who pulls your body on marionette strings, who paints the smile on the mask and answers for you, so you can curl up inside yourself and relive the pain of the last few minutes until it's too much, until you want to cry and rage and scream, all at the same time.
A light comes on, as you're curled up there inside yourself, sobbing low and quite so no one else will hear but hoping, praying that she will. The spotlight's on you now, no escaping it, and they all laugh, all the people inside your head. They laugh and laugh at you, mockeries of people with iron-on faces, laughing and laughing and laughing until you can't hear it anymore and you realize you can't because the laughter is being drowned out by your screams. Suddenly, they're gone, and all around you are the photographs, your memories, the good times when all she needed was you. You reach for one, fingers out and groping, tremblingly, towards the frozen pieces of time. You reach one, and the faces grinning back at you almost make you loose it again, almost make you cry, when it begins to burn. You reach for another, and another, and the room is lit by the burning pictures and the laughing faces are back again and you look, look and you realize it's her.
The bell rings, releasing you from your self-induced hell. You turn to her, then realize her back's to you, not caring, and you get out of the room fast, almost running, pushing people away. The rest of the day blurs, one class after another, all running and loud and people laughing in the halls, laughing and not looking, bumping you, jostling you around. Finally, finally it's over and you can relax, laying in your bed listening to good music when you remember the horror of that one class. It comes crashing down on you again, the pain and the knife that you'd forgotten, twisting again in your wound, and you curl up, doubled over from the pain, but nobody knows...no one knows...no one can ever know, because they'd never leave you alone to cry, never leave you with the pain that has become your sanctuary, the mask that has become you. So you cry, silently, in your bed, worried that the real you will disappear forever, get lost in the knife and the fire. You are caught in the web of the marionette strings, crushed under the weight of your mask.
* * *
No one knows I hurt
On the inside
No one can see
That when the darkness comes
A dam is released
A stopper pulled
And my pain rains down upon me
A torrent I cannot stop
Curled in my bed
Fetus-like, wrapped in my cocoon of blankets
I cry
tears, cold as ice on my cheeks
drip past my nose
and the pillow is damp with my sorrows.