"Heartbreak After Daybreak"

Unveiling the Mask

As the moon began to wash the calm city of Manhattan in its silver glow, Frank was drowning in a fit of his own confusion. Flustered, he paced around the house in a haste of scatterbrainedness, gripping chunks of his hair as he spat at himself. “What kind of example of you setting for your son?” he asked himself as he glared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. “Look at you! Who are you? What has become of you? Listen, if your mother saw what you’ve done to everyone, she’d be ashamed! Shouldn’t I be someone that everyone is proud of?” he hollered ballistically at himself.

“How can you?” Angelique questioned as she leaned confidently in the doorframe, glaring at him with burning eyes.

“What?” he asked, vexed, annoyed.

“Franklin, you can’t expect everyone else to be proud of you if you aren’t proud of yourself,” she answered as she strode towards him, her heels clopping on the linoleum-tiled bathroom floor.

“Pfft, what do you know?” he scoffed, judging her with his eyes, skimming her up and down, and he returned his hair-splitting gaze to his reflection.

“Don’t think I don’t know you’re pained. I can see it in your eyes,” she told him as she held his face, his sorrowful eyes begged her to continue. “You see, when I was a young teenage girl, about fourteen, I just couldn’t deal with the way everyone treated me in school and at home, how everyone always had a way to put me down, and, so, one day, after school, I thought that if I cut myself to show everyone that I was hurt, they’d stop, but it just made things worse. To my dismay, someone reported me to the school guidance counselor about my issue, which I should’ve expect because I never bothered to cover it up, and, after a long discussion, he notified my mother about it, and she sent me to a mental institution where I stayed for three years until I was allowed to come home. Because of how I disrespected myself, I gained the wrong friends, started inappropriate and dishonourable relationships, and I lost most of the friends I really cared about” --she held his hand-- “I felt so alone, Franklin, and, years later, I fell into a deep depression, but, fortunately, I’ve successfully recovered from it by the time I was an adult. What I’m telling you is that you shouldn’t destroy yourself before you get a chance to find out and meet who you truly are because the rest of us are satisfied with the real you, and we couldn’t ask for more because you’re perfect just the way you are. Yes, we all have flaws, but our flaws are the only things that make us real.” After hearing that, he couldn’t help but smile from ear to ear, a tear of pride rolling down his cheek.

        “Wow, to be completely honest with you, I couldn’t have asked for a better woman.” As she blushed under the compliments light, he grasped her jawline and kissed her hard and long on her mouth, a sharp noise sounding from their lips as he pulled away. “I’m impressed,” he told her. “Impressed by how much you’ve gone through in your life, but you’ve never once complained about how much it still hurt you inside, and, because of that, I know how strong you really are, your potential to show the world who you are, that I can expect you to hoist me up after I’ve collapsed; that together we can accomplish greater things, and that makes me very proud of you.”