Masks

April 9th

Disgust was her favorite, too. One day she started to try on this Mask every now and then. The first time, we were in her car and I told her about my fascination with Jeffrey Dahmer. I expressed my feelings of empathy for him. She had been holding my hand. The moment his name left my lips she drew her hand away and pulled the Mask from under her seat, clutching onto it like a last breath. It was a full thirty minutes before I could coax her to remove it. I had been desperately trying to get her to laugh. I missed the way she would beam and the corners of her eyes would crinkle. The warmth of inspiring joy in her cascaded over me like waves.

When we moved in together she decided to house the Mask on the highest shelf in our closet. I felt it staring, always looming. When the fights first started she restrained herself from putting it on and the relief washed over me each time she pulled me into her arms at the end of each day. I used to lie next to her in the dark and take mental snapshots. Sometimes she would smile in her sleep and I hoped she was dreaming of me. I'd later learn that I never played any role in her dreams at all. I lived only in her nightmares.

I only remember bits and pieces of what I had said the day she brought her Mask down from the shelf. I'd been screaming. I'd been blaming her, degrading her. I had told her she was the cause of all of my pain. I told her I was crumbling under the weight of my insufficiency. But then I said something lost in the tunnel-vision of my rage, what I do not recall, and she visibly recoiled. She went to the closet and returned with that awful thing in hand. She dusted it off and her blue eyes vanished underneath it. Something had switched. A light was smothered out. The walls began to wail and I shielded my ears.

Without hesitation she moved to the bookcase in one single movement. She looked like she was gliding, a beautiful phantom. I realized, in that moment, that I had never loved her more. She pulled The Book from it's shelf- where we had displayed it for years. In the beginning, we promised each other we would never read ahead. We would read each page, together, in sequence and at the right pace. We agreed to push past all the typos, all the raw passages, all the indistinct emotions. We savored each chapter and relished in it's possibilities. We never questioned any conclusion other than the good one, the right one. We knew that the best story would work itself out- we just had to trust.

Lately, we'd been stuck on a particular chapter that seemed carelessly emplaced into our story. It didn't belong. It seemed ripped from some tragedy and pasted into ours. All the scenes were wrong. New characters were introduced into places they didn't belong. Events were transposing themselves in alien lands. I ran my finger along the pages and felt the bite of a paper-cut. She started to pick up other books, started to ease her mind in distance from me. We hadn't read in months.

She tore the last pages from the worn spine and set them ablaze in front of me. The flames cast shadows upon her and I swear to this day the Mask quivered in the glow. It's like she was uncomfortable under the forgotten weight of the thing. I thought for a minute that she might take it off, be reborn. Before long she steadied herself, braced against our bed, and I watched as it began to fuse to her skin. I cried and screamed out, tried to rip it away from her but she only fought me and submitted to her transformation. It crept down the skin of her neck, the part that was still visible- the part that was still her. It swallowed the freckle on her left collarbone that I kissed whenever she needed to cry. It bore itself into her until you couldn't see any distinction between where the Mask ended and she began. I couldn't breathe. My heart pounded but I couldn't hear it. She'd never take it off again.

I fell to my knees scrambling to scoop up the scattered ashes that were once our pages. She had defiled the Book. The fucking Book, our Book. She had set a match to the pages and I begged her to help me save them. The Mask simply observed me while I struggled on my hands and knees. I howled in pain, her image blurred by my tears. I'll never forget what she said as she looked down at me, an ant under her heel.

"I guess we'll never know how the story would've ended".