The woman without a face

As simple as, the anxiety of becoming something other than this is disintegrating me. I refuse to be just that, part of that machine, the one that takes my speech away, the one that without violence silences me, where unwanted needs creep up and take over. Those needs fill me with unnecessary panic, a panic bound to a torn, plastic identity, the one created to maintain a façade, so carefully crafted that I no longer recognise as alien. Its glue has irreparably fixed itself to my skin, it has become my skin, to attempt to remove it would tear me apart. Can I mold this fabricated identity into a more real representation of me? Do I even know who me is anymore? It seems I have held on to the mask like a castaway would to the scattered remains of her shattered vessel, fearing only the nothingness that lies behind the mask, the woman without a face.

The fear has paralised me, I sit here unable to write or speak other than with these words. I am afraid of the void, of the result of that heartbreaking war I waged against myself for so long. It is in times of peace that we know how much we need war to stay alive, to transform. Have I transformed beyond my form? Am I holding on to a ghost? Can I rest in these shadows, imagining trees above me instead of a shipwrecked life? When peace comes, all I can do is carefully walk through the remains of the battle and find what can be saved, what can be rebuilt, and calculate how much of an other is needed to be put the pieces back together, even if only temporarily. The tremors of this anxiety resonate in the empty battlefield, memories of an imagined past betray me, am I supposed to be who I used to be before the war? I will start, one by one, peeling off the parts of my perfectly crafted armour, and in the mirror see the image that appears before me. Can I recognise her? Have the wounds shaped her? Will I be able to look into the mirror again, without fear or saddened by the misrecognition? I want to know her story, is it like mine? Has she been inhabiting me all along I wonder? Is her identity shaped the same way as mine is? Will I become her once the mask is off? Will she love me? Who will she see when she looks back from her mirror, will it be me? Will I disappear once my act of rebirth concludes, once I step out of this borrowed armour in pain through love? Can I exist with her?