Oct 21, 2020
Masks (02.26.2019)
I have a couple of friends who often post photos on social media. I think the most striking thing about them is their beauty — the dazzle in their smile, the glint in their eye, their light.
She and I are close and she tells me she feels empty.
Her relationship is a shell, a front, a movie set, a façade.
It’s not real.
She doesn’t know why she stays; she tells me.
She doesn’t know why day after day she comes home to what both of them feel like a hollow life.
Which is true?
What she says, or what I see?
It’s not just that I can’t know if my friends are happy or not.
It’s that he does not know what his wife feels, and she doesn’t know what he is going through.
It’s that they can’t even identify feelings inside themselves, much less in each other.
You can never know what goes on in the life of others.
You hope you can even barely tell what’s going on in yours…
