POKER FACE
No one needs to know everything that you feel and think. Keeping a poker face from the inside makes it easier to show one.
On the outside, I wear many faces, with many expressions and sometimes even I can’t really tell one from the other. Even though I lie, I always know the truth but come on the truth often sucks right? What is a little white lie to help me sleep at night and self-sooth the storm of emotions that threaten to tip the balance into chaos?
A few lies here and there are needed to go on maintaining sanity. I lie about how much I miss you because admitting its depth will keep me in a loop I will never escape.
When the bittersweet nostalgia washes over me and I remember the taste of your soft lips, your brown eyes staring into my soul like I’m the most interesting book you’ve ever read and you’re totally engrossed in it. The way you’d dart your eyes with nervousness when I caught you staring at me with your walls down. I’d smile at you to make you feel more at ease. You always had trouble expressing vulnerability but somehow you found it easy to do it with me although you’d get embarrassed almost immediately afterwards.
I liked it, liked that you could tell me your life stories that were precious to you, of the traumas in your past over the years and the things that were sacred to you. I’d hold you firmly to keep you grounded. Everytime you bared a scar to me, I’d kiss it gently and caress it, I’d tell you your scars are beautiful, you’d flinch away at first but when you looked up, you’d know that I meant it and then you’d relax and give me the freedom to touch you, to transform every inch of you that you thought ugly into something so beautiful it deserved to be worshipped, with my skin, my mouth and my very soul.
You see, I have a tendency to remember only the good things, the joyful things, the important things. Everytime I find myself wandering off lost in the beautiful memory of you, I open my eyes and force myself to remember the pain too. The way you pushed me away and shut yourself out no matter how much I begged you to see me, to let me in, how anxious I got worrying about you and the mental stress that came with being yours and having to watch you destroy yourself. It was too much for me, for my usually closed heart that had fully opened itself to you. I was in agony, I felt inadequate and In the end I chose myself over you.
So I lie again that I don’t miss you, atleast not so much anyway. No one will even know that I do, Not with this poker face I wear. I lie that I don’t consider ever getting back with you. I lie that you’re not potentially my greatest past love. I know that we cannot work, not after everything, there is just so much junk. So I lie that you are just a regular person I once tangled with, one from many moons ago. I’ve had others after you but the question remains still, haunting me every now and then “how could I have loved someone so much and still let them go?”
