The hide

In the middle of the day I left room twentyeight with a slight regret of having said too much, of having disclosed every thought that roams through my mind, be it mature or immature, deserving to be known, or better buried for the dead. I walked out of the room with a large pane of glass window, where we were bathed in the warm afternoon winter sun, the kind of world I was often lost to, in which I would let down my guard, and consequently say more than I should.

It comes with a fear, a kind of fear that you'd taste in between your teeth in the middle of the night, wishing you hadn't told the world everything there is to know about you. What is there to know about me? a 25-year-old who's seen too little of the world, who is nothing but judgmental, who has too much pride and too little faith? Who sits through dinner parties with her fingers twisted, bitten, stained with blood under the table? Who can't muster enough courage for a simple act of picking up the phone and dialing the numbers? Who tightens her shoulders at every word she writes down, stiffens her eyebrows at the unsightliness of the world?

There are times when I am told that I have a nice smile. A smile that would charm the men's socks off, so I was told. A smile that will bring down the bridge, the kind that'd melt your heart. I thought long and hard about the truth of the statement. And sometimes, just sometimes, I don't know how much I deserve the smile.

In between the jazz, I sat through Brown Sugar last night, among the cigarette smokes and whiskeys, from time to time asking if the man was missing me. Having lost Lilu to the hide the entire day, I was starting to understand what it would feel like to having lost your precious one. I was at one point someone's preciousness. Today the man sits at home, fears for his life, goes on life not knowing how well his precious one is faring the world, or how the world fares her.

Then I thought perhaps I shouldn't have said so much about who I really am. It was the sunlight. The warm winter afternoon sunlight.