Only You

 The Mask Wouldn’t Come Off

That was horrible. Completely, utterly horrible.

I told you I was going to the town hall—to pay the bills, to keep something ordinary intact—but even then there was a fracture, a hairline crack running through everything we said. You told me you’d meet me after. You always said you would meet me after. As if after was a place we could still reach.

I was with him—the man in the marine officer’s uniform. You never liked that. Or maybe you imagined it into something else. I asked him to leave the house. I did. Because I could already feel it then, the way you were slipping away from me—not physically, but inwardly, retreating behind something harder, colder. There were jealousies where there didn’t need to be. Doubts that grew teeth. Mistrust that fed on nothing at all.

It wasn’t necessary.

My heart hadn’t changed. That’s the part that won’t settle in me. It stayed the same while everything else twisted out of shape.

You put on that mask—the impenetrable one. Iron. Not metaphorically. Not figuratively. It was iron. I could feel it when I tried to reach you, cold and unyielding, bolted into place. There was no seam, no weakness, no way in.

But we tried.

God, we tried.

He cried incessantly, a sound that didn’t belong to any one person, just grief made audible. And you—you were screaming, not words, just noise, raw and tearing at the air. Between the crying and the screaming, I thought something might give. That the pressure would crack the mask, that the locks would loosen.

But they didn’t.

We couldn’t remove it. Not the iron. Not the locks. Not the distance.

So I left.

I walked down the hill under a sky that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be—heavy, grey, unmoving. The wind cut through me, sharp and indifferent, and I remember thinking I should have worn something else. Something warmer. Something wiser. But I was only seventeen, and at seventeen you dress for the moment, not the aftermath.

I didn’t know any better.

I needed someone to care for me. That much I understood, even then. A need so simple it should have been easy to answer. But it couldn’t be you anymore. Not with the mask. Not with the screaming. Not with everything you refused to take off, to lay down, to let go.

So it had to be him.

But he wouldn’t stop crying.

And then you came back into it—like a storm that refuses to pass. You spoiled it all. You ruined everything, not with violence, not even with anger, but with that quiet, unapologetic certainty.

You said you loved me.

And I couldn’t allow that.

Because love, from you, didn’t come without the mask. It didn’t come without the locks. It didn’t come without suffocation.

So I returned to the house.

Or what was left of it.

The walls had fallen down—not broken, not shattered, just… gone, as if they’d given up holding anything together. There were no lights. No shadows even, just absence. The people had left, their voices still echoing faintly, like something remembered badly. The music had stopped mid-note, leaving a silence that felt staged, deliberate.

And the party—

the party was over.

Not gradually. Not gently.

Over.