Mask of Quiet Storms

My words are sharper than a knife, yet somehow they still stay sheathed. I cling to this mask of borrowed calm to hide the storms beneath. But no matter how tight I hold it on, the fractures start to creep— thin cracks across the porcelain face of secrets I can’t keep. I try to live in bittersweet moments, small flashes of fragile light, yet I stumble over silent words I buried out of sight. They claw against the walls of thought, echoing through my brain, reminding me this mask I wear was carved from quiet pain. I’m desperate not to feel again that cold, familiar sting— the one I locked inside the dark where broken memories cling. A basement built of shattered thoughts, fragments of a fractured mind, where pieces of the past still whisper of the self I left behind. Know this—my heart is not ill-driven, though the path feels tightly roped. I keep a fragile thread of hope in knots of self-doubt scoped. Yet instead of slipping free from it, or falling from the strings, I linger there between the notes and feel the wicked stings. So I sit, uncertain, searching for the words I meant to say— but half the time my mind forgets the language of the day. I want to speak what lives inside, to let the silence out,