Enigma

Enveloped in enigma. I didn’t want it to happen like that. But it did anyway. Pages from my life’s story were ripped from my hands, and I was powerless to do anything about it. And with these pages went my face. What remains is but an apparition, an amorphous visage, of what was once a clarion countenance.

I could lay out my story, in part, from faint memories that haunt me with their persistent pleas for recognition, for some validation of their now trivial existence. But others have re-written my story for me. They said it was too dangerous to affirm what was once manifest, but now carefully camouflaged. With the avulsion of my face, a new one was crafted with the same surgical skill used to remove the former image.

And they took my voice too. It wasn’t enough to simply supplant the superficial. No, they had to delve deeper and smother every vestige of vocal tone I could call my own. I must be muted. No longer could I be me. I had to live a new life – their life.

Over my barren soul they layered papier-mâché, a convincing construct, whose only truth is that it is wholly a lie. “But this is the price of your freedom” they muttered. But why does it have to cost so much? Why can’t this scandalous truth be embraced by the light? Is it still too treacherous? And whose life plummets for your preservation? Mine, if there still is a “mine.”

Everything that was me they laid waste to with calculated cunning. The scattered shards of my soul puncture and bleed my callous feet as I try to stagger away from the life that was once my own. I must bury me. They have provided the casket and will surround it with soil if I will but lay myself into their sepulchral solution. Solution? For whom?

Content with my extinguished existence, they celebrate their triumph over my troubles. They congratulate themselves on delivering their duty, my erasure. “Another case solved. Another tragedy averted” they exclaim. But it is I who starts over. They just continue, lives uninterrupted and unencumbered.

Casually they comment, “You have done the right thing by preserving justice and bearing bravery.” My consolation is isolation, my reward reinvention. But I find no comfort in this novel, lonely life – no reward in starting anew by denying my distorted history.

I was once. Really I was. I am not now. Really I am not. An amorphous façade, enigmatic by necessity, not nature. A fictitious face, forced by fortune, not by fidelity.