A litte tête-à-tête

There’s something tearing away at the back of my mind, I can hear the whispers. You’re a failure, they say. You’re wasting life. Tug my hair as I might, twist and turn at night, I can’t let go of the thought, What if they’re right? Minutes ticking, time for rest diminishing. I flee the bed chambers to enter the examination room; a little man to man, a little tête-à-tête. Let’s examine the face: the hollow circles around the eyes, the gray blue hue that has captured the imagination of many a fair admirer, but now not so bright, now a little cold, stars in the eyes have died. There the lips that can break into that smile, the smile that can melt hearts and change minds. Better than any theatre prop or beautician’s talent, when that smile breaks out the audience is drawn into the fiction of happy endings or beginnings or whatever else it is that they imagine. For the words never really leave the mouth, but somehow that smile seems to leave no one in doubt. That is the man, the babble rises, who is content beyond his heart’s desire, yet never proud, always good natured. But it was little more than white lies to clothe himself from prying eyes. Note the tilt of the head, the cheeks slightly sallow, the teeth once so white now a little yellow due to increase in caffeine that has become borderline addiction, but to withdraw is to fall foul of symptoms that knock the inner forehead without invitation. The hair is still fine, healthy and full despite all the tugging and sharp painful pulls that are administered to try awakening the senses from defeatist realist adherence. Signs of acne still appear from day to day, yet they promised this would stop back around 2008 when teenhood doors closed and the twenties arrived in a flurry of more responsibilities and a stronger dose of life. That’s not to say that life hasn’t been grand, there are traces in this face of a rare beautiful love, the touch of gentle woman’s hand that has cared for this face and given more to it than all of those petty thwarted plans. But he feels he has let her down once too many, no longer quite sure he deserves to be around. You can read all this in the forehead’s lines and that cheerless smile he only reveals during these nocturnal examination times. So what is there left to say of this well-familiar face that it has not already heard a thousand times before? Not much really, you might as well give up trying to soothe and calm that mind. Think of it as the aspiring artist within to self-torment inclined. So scrub that face hard and scrub it clean, rest that head on the pillow that nurtured all those adolescent dreams, a few deep breaths (and a couple of sighs), then no more whispers, not at least until the following night.