Façade

The late afternoon sun crawled in through the blinds, congealing in puddles of liquid gold on the wooden floor. These small slivers of light were the only form of illumination in the otherwise dark house. A loud clack echoed through the empty home, signalling the teenager’s return from school.  Tim stepped into the hall, the laughter of his friends following him until the heavy door thudded shut. The smile lingered on his face as he called out to the cloying emptiness, but there was no one to hear him.

He kicked off his shoes and padded through the drifting motes of dust to the blinds, closing them to shut out the harsh, judging light. The floorboards were cool underfoot as he reached up to his face, undoing the rough straps and clasps of thought and concentration that held his mask of confidence in place. The ceramic mask let out a pneumatic sigh as it came away from his head, cracked from the strain of a day’s use, the smile still frozen in place. He placed it gently, almost apprehensively, on the mahogany table, the shadow covering a whorl in the old wood. On contact with the dark tabletop it fractured, tiny crevices like spiderwebs dancing across its porcelain surface. The wastewater-grey thing inhabiting Tim’s body let out a tired breath as his features assumed a practiced neutrality. It was the expression of someone neither joyous nor tortured. The look of someone floating somewhere far away.

On the table, the mask groaned and collapsed in on itself. Fragments of false confidence and shards of rehearsed happiness slowly broke down, dripping from the table in teardrops of manufactured levity, colliding with the lacquered floorboards with a soft plink.

The greyness consumed a small, poorly prepared meal, the bitterness leaving a sour taste in his mouth. The inside of his stomach had become a cavernous hollow, hungering for something that could not be sated by any meal. It was a familiar feeling now, an unwanted companion. The constant ache of a phantom limb.

Plink.

The hollow roiled uneasily through his intestines, demanding some tribute but giving no indication as to what it desired. The greyness wandered into the living room and turned on the TV, watching without seeing the group of cartoon people as they discussed animals or houses or something equally trivial, the sounds ricocheting off his eardrums and back out into space. The drilling emptiness in his stomach churned, spurting needle-like ridges that grated at his innards. His tongue rubbed the inside of his cheeks, tasting blood and dirt.

Plink.

The greyness quickly grew restless and began to browse through a book from the squat coffee table, breathing it in. The smell of dust and mustiness. The slight roughness of the thin pages, familiar to him on an almost fundamental level.

Plink.

Within minutes his eyes had begun to slide over the words, his numbed brain reducing them to incomprehensible lines and shapes. The greyness no longer truly held any hope that these activities would enthral him or stall the hollowness, but he went through the motions regardless. It was the physical manifestation of the impatient, irritating feeling to go and do something. It could be getting some food or going for a run or yelling and screaming as loud as he could, just to tell the world hello, I am still here, and I am alive. But of course it was never any of these things. It was just an itch he couldn’t scratch. It had become something of a game; he would find menial activities to while away the time and in return the hollowness would continue to grow.

Eventually, the rest of his family got home. The greyness scooped up what remained of the mask and affixed it to his face, gluing together the ten thousand shards of glass and tears. He was tired, though, and the façade sometimes slipped, earning him worried looks that were quickly dismissed by the oft-rehearsed phrase, “I’m just a bit tired”. After dinner, the greyness retreated to his room, a safe haven from social expectations, a lair in which to lick his wounds. It smelled of books. Sleep. Three-day-old dirty laundry. Safe smells.

The lights began to go out in the house, signalling to the greyness that it was time to rest, to build up the energy required for tomorrow. The phantasmal cold came, seeping through the blankets that the greyness had piled around himself, coating his body in a sheet of acidic frost that complemented the empty pain in his stomach, wearing away his defences until all that remained was the bleached centre of loneliness and self-loathing. The core shivered from the imagined cold, pointlessly pulling the blankets closer and huddling beneath them until he fell asleep to visions of his own incompetency.

When morning came, the core regenerated its protective layer, no longer refuse grey but a thicker congealed ash colour. After a few minutes, the ceramic mask was back, the façade reconstructed, the cheery smile fixed in place once more amidst images of merriment etched in the brightest hues.

The mask that would keep the coldness away.

At least for one more day.