masquerade

it’s bizarre how we'd sometimes feel to have lost something we had never actually owned,  i thought while i was carefully examining the colourful masks in a souvenir shop, feeling lost and suspended in the middle of the wandering crowd of tourists along a narrow Venetian alley.

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it hurts!  and it was painful not because i was abandoned for someone else...  it's heart-breaking because for a few years, love seemed to have had me visually impaired only to realise, after all, that everything about my past relationship was a masquerade!

clearly, grieving was supposedly inessential; ridiculous as it might seem, i lamented over losing someone that wasn’t even mine.  that moment i wondered if me sobbing, in its real sense, was a sign of a weakness or a strength; then i'd find solace in the thought that it’s the coward, not me, who'd suffer more.   they’d say that enduring an interminable misery might, in the end, imperative should one choose to remain a coward— the one who’d bravely keep on hiding behind a stern face just to get applauded before the critical eyes of the society.

so mysterious these masks, when one's wearing one; how colourful and lovely to look at from the outside but it's horribly uncomfortable from the inside, i thought as i moved on to check out the next shop— determined to face and embrace the promise of a renewed life after this unknown period of my voluntary exile.

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typed on a mobile phone, 02 November 2018; one sleepless night while in one of the rooms of Hotel Ca’ Del Campo, Venezia, Italia.