Cognitive Masks

The shadow slipped away from me, as the sun continued to dive into its pit. It seemingly mocked me to follow but I was in no mood to play. I stared down at it till it vaporized with the burying sun. I don't know why I always get caught up with the illusions of my relationships and I forget that everything that I see in others is simply my own shadow. I don't know why I see myself in them as if in a mirror, reflecting my past and my issues back to me. I find it so hard to accept this verity because when I relate to other people, my reflection is often masked through a smoke screen full of my emotions. My outer projects smoothness, but I know that the calm exterior is my mask, ever-changing and ever-concealing. I wear hundreds of masks, masks that I'm unwilling to take off and none of them are at all me.

I start with the thought that the people around me have remained the same and then one day I find that they are not the same. Even among people subjected to only a slight change I felt that the change was not purely material. I see them as through a bleached misty glass which feigns their facial aspect with a sort of fogginess and they expose what they allow me to observe as if it were life-size, though in reality it was far away, not in the sense of space, but, basically like being on another shore wherefrom they had as much difficulty in recognizing me as I them. Some assay to smooth out, to extend the whiteness of the soul, disowning the piquancy of menaced dimples, suppressing the resistance of a smile condemned and unarmed, while others, realizing that their beauty had finally bygone, take refuge in expression, as one compensates the loss of the attractiveness by the art of choice of words, and hang on to a haughty grimace, to a smirk, to a pensive gaze, or to a smile to which muscular unskillfullness gave the appearance of a mask.

Emotions flourish no longer than roses live, and unlike the roses it flowers in the dead of winter, emits a sort of faint foul smell, and dies before the summer sets in. It may be true. In this view there is room for every love except for the reversed creed of love, the mask and cloak of waterless despair; for every joyfulness; every sorrow; for every dream, for every hope. The ultimate aspire is to remain true to the emotions called out of the bottom of our souls surrounded by our friends, our relationships, our bygone loves, whose countless numbers and awful distances may move us to laughter or tears. The success in hand, however, is to keep these reminiscences from turning into confessions

Time bought my way: daily obligations, new impressions, old memories. I've noticed that it was not the outcome of a need - the famous need of self-expression which impels me as a hidden, blurred necessity, a completely masked and unexplainable phenomenon.

That past brims me with weariness while exchanging conversations, for it links with those imaginings of my past which seems the most cherishable and inaccessible. I console myself by masking myself but my past relations with other beings are magnified by dreams more ardent and with complete hopelessness with which my day opens up everyday, so entirely exiguous, narrow, mournful ribbon of a despised and unloved intimacy in which I discover no trace of what had once been their enigma; their always-wanted fever and their loveliness.

I'm petrified that my own mask is already so hidden beneath me and I don't think I'm so strong enough to retain my past that has escaped back so far. If at least, time takes pity and allots me some, I wouldn't fail to bond it with the chains of love, the scarcity of which nests itself upon me with so much force today occupying a place in time infinitely more important than the curtailed mask reserved for them in space, a place, on the, contrary, elongated boundlessly since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant durations they have lived through, that they stand like giants immersed in time and I cherish that I lose my memory and be born again.