They can be a source of pain, and usually are. It can be good pain, bad pain, or just pain. And when they end they can be sour and bitter and painful to the bone. There are questions of why and how and who is to blame. When there are other factors, homes, pets, cars, children, futures and pasts, there is so much more sources of pain and betrayal. We can feel tricked and deceived, we can feel lied to. We let this pain into our hearts and we can let it change our relationships to others and to ourselves.
During our relationship and after we form images of ourselves and other people. We romanticize, villanize, and realize we never even saw them for who they were. We saw their image, we saw what we wanted to see and not what was. The illusions disappear like smoke and what is left is the ash behind. Sometimes that’s why we lash out, because we feel like a fool for never seeing the face behind the mask, the truth under the illusion. We feel made the fool.
So we vent, we tell people about our deceptive selves the deceptive others, we portray these images, these pictures of our lives and our relationships. And they’re not always accurate. Because their steeped in emotions. They reside in them and they stew in them and they become distorted. Like that one incident which rears its ugly head and morphs into something else. We spread these images and they can evolve, grow larger, become much more than we intended. We begin to believe our own illusions. And we let that poison spread.
How do we separate it? Can we distill it, do we begin again, how do we rid ourselves of that stain? It pervades our memories and our words, it’s everywhere. So how can we filter back to the purity, the truth (if there ever was one)? What do we do with these monsters, these clowns, these masks we’ve had for years, that we’ve become used to, that others know. How do we unmask ourselves? How do we remove the makeup, open the shutters, and uncover the facts?