New Skin

I spent the year as a new person with a different identity. I spent the year as someone else because being myself was too much to bear. I spent the year looking for ways to change myself. I got contacts, I dyed my hair, I bought new clothes and didn’t return them. Even though they looked like a false skin when I looked in the mirror. I became an illusion because being real was too close to the truth.

It would mean facing the life that I have lived and not lived. Recognizing that I have let time slip through my fingers like lake water, drowning in a bathtub of regret. Dragged to the bottom by the same hands that have worn themselves around my neck like jewelry with their threats before. Acknowledging that I am not the person that I wanted to be. My small self would not be proud of where I have ended up, the path that I have chosen for myself. The path that I have chosen for her. Every time that I have let her down in the past.

I spent the year in a new city with a new name and the same loneliness. The same empty bed, the same bitter coffee, the open laptop screen a lone light in the dark. Erased everything that I have written.

But this life is not my own and it is not one that I can say that I have lived. Because I have not lived it for myself.