Warm Water Worries

Your eyes are red from crying. She asks you what's wrong and you shrug her off. You do not want her to know you've ever shed a tear. She has laughed at you before, she will laugh again. Besides, men don't cry. Or is it just strong men who don't? Great men? So you go into the hot shower and cry until you can no longer breathe. You hurt, and hurt, and hurt. The pain seems eternal but no one seems to care.

You put mousse in your hair. "Have you been crying?" She asks laughing. You look at her in anger, as though you could kill her with your eyes. Anger is acceptable, though others say it surprises them, say it's wrong. But that is how a man reacts. Tears are another story. You shake your head; you cannot cry.

When you were younger you couldn't have cared less what people thought. You would have cried in front of them. But you soon learned the error of your ways; you soon learned that would be the worst thing you could do. Inside you are screaming, your soul tears itself apart. But outside you are smiling. Your mask shrouds itself in what you hate the most: false happiness.

You approach the TV, you can't stand the melodramatic soap opera playing on it. It makes you want to kill the characters. They are so horrible, so mediocre, yet others think of them as real, even respectable. Boy, people can be so stupid. There's nothing that helps. It hurts, but no one can know. You cannot show weakness to anyone. They don't respect your strength, your intelligence, your decisions, your life as it is. You cannot give them reason to pity you, to disrespect your character even further. So you act as though you had no love in you, except for that one person. You act as though you do not care. You show yourself evil, desperately angry.

You are angry, that you are. You are desperate of course. You believe you deserve to be punished for your weakness. You believe that you'd be better off dead, yet you are afraid of both death and retribution.

So you cry once a year, during commemoration holidays, in the privacy of a warm shower. You suck it up every day, go to work, deal with stress, deal with truth, deal with lies. You act as though you're made of teflon when in truth you're made of glass. You suffer from a love that kills. You act as though you're angry because violence is the only solution you've ever known, the only one allowed the strong. And you want everything to be destroyed, and you can't wait for this world to end. Maybe, just maybe, then all things will be better. But maybe they'll hurt more.