Make Believe...

It's been another day, another just like the rest. School, work, church. Whatever happened today, it doesn't really matter because it's over. She's that much closer.

She flips off the switch, the light from her lamp and in her eyes disappearing in the same instant. She no longer has to pretend. It's late, past bedtime and she crawls under the quilt. Ear buds in, she closes her eyes, and the ritual begins. Slowly, the longing strains of an organ seep into her mind and she begins a mental inventory of her day. Her week. Her life. Every night she does this. Because every day she wakes up, smears on the makeup and the positive attitude in one swipe. It's not that she’s ugly, it's that she is too stressed to remember her beauty. It's not that she's negative; it's that she is too weighed down to be light hearted. It's not that she isn't happy; it's that she is too busy to feel happiness. But they don't know.

They know she is busy, sure, but do they know what its doing to her? The real her. No, because every morning she carefully applies the her they want to see. The version of her that is on top of her studies, never shares a cross word and will come to the rescue at any moment for the sake of another. They don't know that she studies life from the bottom, that her words are only cross when they are to herself, and that what she really needs to someone to rescue her. Someone to simply care about how she really feels.

Someday there will be someone. But she doesn't need anyone right now. Just her music. And late at night, with her blinds shut to the possibility of the stars beyond, she escapes into her music and the world in which she will one day live. A world where she can be herself, the beautiful girl she knows she is. Where she can think things and say things without fear of being labeled, tossed into the section of "rebellious teenagers" where adults keep those they'd rather ignore. Someday she will wake up and skip the mascara, grab her favorite shirt and rock her natural hair. Someday she will travel afar and introduce herself to total strangers, because no one will care who she associates with. She will sleep in, because the freedom to declare the value of her health over the importance of a meeting will be at last attained.

But until then. Her music will lull her into a painful sleep, a brief and horrible escape where she will dream of the nightmarish world in which she poses at the top. And in just a few short hours, still in the dark of the morning, she will wake up to the innocent blaring of her old alarm clock and apologize to it. It's not its fault she doesn’t like to get up.

She will walk to the mirror in the dark and carefully apply the girl people expect, masking the one she loves.

But it's O.K.

Because she is one day closer to the end of this game of make believe.



-- "Fix You", Coldplay