You carry a mask in the back pocket of your jeans.

It’s a curious mask, to be sure, with many careful nuances that only a trained eye could detect. There are stories hidden in the slight wrinkle just above the left eye, the dimple on the right cheek, the blush of both cheeks in proper lighting, the fold of the inner ears. One story intertwines with the another to form a more complex tale that boasts fact and truth but presents only fiction and lies rooted in the deepest of sincerities.

You’ve spent moments, minutes, hours, years working on your mask to perfect it, and now that it’s almost complete (always almost but never quite) you carry it with you wherever you go (safely tucked away in the pocket of your blue denim jeans) so when you run into contact with people you can slip it on and shield yourself from the harsh eyes around you.

You haven’t looked at yourself in the mirror for as long as you can remember. You’re too scared of what will look back at you--that the monster on the other side of the glass will wash away everything you’ve designed yourself to be with that mask of yours.

Sometimes you need to breathe, though. The mask (while most beautiful in its design) suffocates, chokes, blinds and deafens you.

And so when (you believe) no one is watching you take it off and slip it in your back pocket.

Today a friend calls you on the phone because her mom has called her fat again. In the back of your mind you can only think that this story will become another part of your own mask, and secretly you wonder if she’s carrying a mask of her own.

Or maybe she’s not carrying a mask. Maybe she’s carrying a mannequin--a thin one with curves, yes, but in the right places. She can hide in her mannequin, you think, in the way you slip on your mask--only her stories are spread over the whole body instead of concentrated into the many subtle details of the face.

You take careful note of what she tells you though, for her story will come to be part of your own (suffocating, choking, blinding, deafening) mask because her problems can be turned into your solutions. Maybe her (woeful) story will become the careful turn of the lips (so you will be reminded not to eat).

You hang up the phone (your friend is still crying), take out your mask and work hours into the night trying to perfect it. You slip it on (you suffocate, you choke, you’re blinded and you’re deafened) and head out to roam the city for more stories to spin onto your creation. Each night you (desire, need, crave the opportunity to) take bits and pieces from (the masks and mannequins of) other people and decorate your own Tormentor (your own mask) with them.

You know, though, that however many times you take from other people, your mask will never be complete--but anything is better than that horrible degrading thing you call a face (and a personality). But it’s O.K., my Collector of Masks--I carry my own mask (my own burden) in the left pocket of my pink North Face fleece. (When I put it on) it suffocates, chokes, blinds and deafens me, but even those consequences are better than revealing myself to myself.