Hidden Within

Her eyes pulsated like the orange fire of the newly lit coal as you blow on it, and when you step away, that fire recedes back to darkness sitting behind the white ashened surface, a deceiving façade disguising the sharp passion engorged beneath. She had taught herself that her feelings were exactly that, her feelings; they belonged to her and were not for public show or consumption. She had taught herself that others would feed on your feelings like vampires, judging you by their taste, assuming some right over you and that you now owe them something of yourself that was never available to give nor theirs to take. So she had taught herself to save her own neck. She knew that love was her own, it could not be shared except if another felt love at the same time, that is always a choice but one that is held for oneself. ‘How,’ she used to think, ‘is the way I feel the same as the way you feel?’ Only the language we use is the same, ‘I have no idea about what love or pain or joy or misery is for anyone else,’ she thought. Empathy is a joke we tell ourselves so that we may not be alone. It is a selfish act, not the other way around as people would have it; no, she wasn’t cold, she wasn’t selfish, she simply understood things as they truly were and instead of fooling herself and others, she lived in that knowledge. And as for fitting in, for being ‘understanding’, sympathetic? Well it wasn’t her fault she was right!