Masks were a part of every day life for Vanessa. She was the proud owner of a collection, a different mask for every occasion, polished up and held ready in that corner of the brain where a personality is supposed to be.
There was the superficial mask she used at every ball she had attended, full of “Thanks you sir”’s and “Pardon me madam”’s. It was a mask full of bubbling social politeness. Then there was the mask she wore for her friends. Snobbish and rude, behind the gaping eyeholes of this mask she could say pretty much anything she wanted. Reputations were punctured, gossip was spread, and the pointless activities of yesterday’s news were discussed in high twittering voices and double layers of meaning.
A different mask for every occasion, as numerous and variable as life itself.
But lately in the dark quiet of her bed chambers, she could sometimes feel the masks slipping away, disintegrating into a thousand pieces of fantasy mixed in with a million shards of intangible dreams. Without it, she felt no more substantial than a wisp of nothingness, fragile, delicate, easily blown about on every wind of criticism.
Who was Vanessa really?
It was a question that she, herself didn’t really want an answer too, but somehow, deep down in the nether regions of her soul, she knew it was a question that had to be answered. And so naturally, she fought with every atom, every molecule, every teeny tiny piece of somethin--that same soul maybe--to keep those masks in place, polished, primped, and ready to go at any moment. She felt like she would be nothing without them, her all-purpose selection of identities.
And so she cracked, cracked under the combined weight of millions of masks, millions of personalities.
It happened that fateful day in the garden with Liam, her chosen suitor of the month. She could trace the supernova of her sanity, and therefore status, back to one single instant of weakness. The moment her mask slipped away for just a second.
One question led to her ultimate demise. One question that had been burning away inside of her, slowly eroding the wide-eyed mask of vapid admiration she wore to stave off Liam’s dull monologue of rice exports and boarder conflicts. It pounded through her bloodstream, a nagging sliver forcing its way deeper into her body with every beat of her heart until the only thing she could hear was a mad rushing sound in her ears. The pressure built and built until she thought she would surely burst.
Suddenly she realized that Liam was staring at her curiously.“Princess? Is there something wrong? You appear to be quite…indisposed.”
She shoved down the mad urge to laugh. Indisposed hardly seemed to capture the scope of it.
