Sealed

[plumtreeblossom]

Someone once wrote a poem for/to/about me. A while back, more than a year. The last few lines read:

Inside you is where every bit of you is.
The public only sees a performance, be it tears, or laughs,
or even a simple contented smile.
Where are your smiles, your tears?
Have they even left your heart yet, or are you
sealed off
like a cork in a casket.
Trying to escape all external gravity.


At the time, it enraged me. I didn't feel he knew me nearly well enough for such an appraisal, such a diagnosis. I read it there on my monitor in the dark of my room, lines obscured to illegible black scratchings by tears of fury and injustice. He had no business making speculative, baseless presumptions like this about me, particularly given the emotionally loaded circumstances of the time. I felt his words were dismissive and patently incorrect.

I loathed that poem, but I never told him so. In fact I thanked him most cordially for it, but didn't read it again. I also didn't catch the irony of my clipped reticence for quite a while.

I thought of that poem this morning. Still posted where it was a year ago.

How right might he have been after all?

What do I not let out?

What is there that I've only shown to myself, but mistakenly believed others could see?