Fiction Prompt: Everybody's Fool

     I never was and never will be the picture-perfect portrait of who you thought I’d be. I lean more toward descriptors that lack the colors you wish to see in me. I lack the happy grace of being the little Miss Sunshine I lied about being, by coaxing my dark soul to slumber under chemically induced dreams. Under waves of drowsy daydreaming, the plane of reality and fiction slant to give me a glimpse into an alternate universe. One where normality was an everyday thing, not something I strived for with each pop of a pill and sip of a drink, and hoped my mind would mend or even heal. The same routine day in and day out, one pill after the other, to deal with the reality I feel trapped in while reaching toward what I thought could have been. Like quicksand reaching up my legs, pulling me into the never-ending pit of sorrow laden with the darkness in which I tread.
    They say, “You should smile more. A positive mind does more than the drugs.”
    I can’t help but laugh, a humourous laugh in the faces of people closest to me when my darkness seeps into the not chemically laden existence of seemingly normal people hiding behind smiles like monsters behind masks. Positivity is the mask I shun because no amount of positive reinforcement will heal what others have done. It won't heal the heartbreak of wanting too much and reaching out to people who turned around before I fell to the floor. The drugs calm me enough to see through emotional rose-tinted glasses to the scene left unfiltered and remained unseen.
    If baptism of my soul would wipe my slate clean, I would drown my sorrows in holy water until I awoke from these bad dreams. With a blank slate before me, I’d paint another world where the only mask I would wear was the badge of honor of not being a horror, heart open to love like I’ve been trying to do. But monsters like me have hearts too, and as our broken shards are slashed and impaled, cries become growls deep from wounded souls aching to be soothed. Instead, we love so hard that we scare the weak away, another mask falling into place while trying to line up a new personality for someone to love and not walk away.
    No amount of time will heal the vicious crimes of letting yourself love people more than they love you. You take to self-flagellation to keep your multiple personalities from shattering all at once as they stand lined up in hopes someone sticks. But how long will it take for you to follow through, to stay alone, and not waste your breath? On people who curl their fingers around your upturned throat and choke you out for the nothing you are worth.
    No one needs saving; they only need saving from you.
    Lives would be better if you’d just stay away.
    The mind a powerful bully and killer of self-identity, goading you with words heard when you were a kid. No one is coming to save you from the hauntings of the past that visits in your dreams as fears line the halls that you try to run. No amount of positivity available to shield from attacks from all sides as we search for a private patch of perfection mending the seams.
    We glean perfection from the people that exist only in our heads, our fantasies, and make-believe. They’re stories we tell ourselves in hopes of someone proving our positive delusions right, that maybe there is a batch of “just right people” out there that understood the darkness in which you stood. Humanity selfish in their perusal of understandings; we hail from different universes created inside our heads, movements dictated by an untrustworthy inner narrator set to destroy it all. We starve at the hands of ourselves, grasping for made-up visions in our imaginations left to gestate in the sliver of hope left behind. A seedling we water and watch, waiting tirelessly for the tiniest bit of life to peek through and give us that hope we seem absent of.
    Just one little feeling, not produced by the drugs, one sliver of hope so we don’t end it all, or hope for the warmth of anyone willing to see outside of themselves.
    For once.
    I want someone to stay and love the monster in me.