The acrylic mask

 

Your put downs hurt me,

the way you shaped the narrative,

through flicked brush lines,

with every time you drew me

small, invisible,

weak, stale, insignificant,

frail, feeble,

like I wasn’t an equal but

a project that just needed

a few more lines,

a bit more refinement, 

some parts rubbing out,

to be replaced with

your own warped art.

 

But what hurt more

was when I started to agree.

When I started to pick up the brush

and scrub away the previous lines.

When I fell back down a hole

I’d spent so long climbing.

You were projecting

a false image upon me,

you layered up every detail,

every smeared brush stroke,

I was a canvas for you to emote

with your own self-doubt.

But my own self doubt

was painting it all as true.

And that hurt more 

than any extra coat could do.

 

You tried to implant falsehoods,

telling me what I was doing, when

in truth your mind

was lying to us both.

You saw only the hurt

that someone could do,

blind to the truth

sat in front of you.

But you painted me

with so many different layers

that I was no longer there,

I was just a facade

of the man I could be.

I started to see myself

as an acrylic reprint,

not the me I’d already inked

through my life previously.

 

I’ve always believed

I was wearing a mask.

Putting on a persona,

to cope with the world.

But after peeling the layers

of paint from my skin,

I’ve begun to realise

that the face staring back

at me, in flakes of dried fear,

is the mask that you

painted upon me,

and the true person beneath

is the one happy in their skin.