Paints

For the last two years, I’ve felt myself slipping slowly. Smiles light up electric white, and laughter rings as clear as glass shards. People watch my beautiful, painted mask slip and fall, some think I’m terrifying, others can’t believe anyone could suggest anything remotely close to that. And me? I like to believe that I’m somewhere between the two.

There are days where the sunlight makes it past the layers of paint caking up my skin, days where the dust that used to be my eyelids solidifies in the warmth peeking through. Days when my nails don’t feel so sharp against my palms and the electric light has become flame. And if I’m lucky, it starts to melt away the mask.

But then there are days when I’m frozen all over, and the paint’s started slipping off. It doesn’t fit me anymore. Nothing fits me anymore. And when that happens, I feel the dust settling in my corneas, and the world sees the cracks under my skin, and I can’t close my eyes. These are the days when people call me terrifying–no, terrible. These are the days when I become neon, fluorescent, harsh.

It wasn’t always that way.

I see a girl walk past me, her skirt rolled up so it’s shorter and tighter. Her hoodie covers the hem and her face is covered in makeup. As she passes me, her friends run to gush over her hair. I find my locker and put my books in their places.

In Art class that afternoon, the girl paints a breathtaking sunset. I look at my own messy crimson canvas, then at myself reflected in the paint cups. I dip a flat-edged brush in and swipe it over my nose, slathering it thickly across my lips, my forehead, my eyelids. I smooth it out, making sure it covers every inch. Then again. The best painting I’ve ever done.

I see two boys hunched over a math equation, crowding me out. I peek over their shoulders. I know this. I learned it last year.

My answer is wrong.

I reach into my backpack, pull out my paints, and dip again. Dip, swipe, smooth. Dip, swipe, smooth. It feels good to do this; feels soothing; feels safe.

I see my mother’s disappointed face as she holds up my test scores. Next time you’ll get it, she says. Or maybe it’s something else. I can’t hear it above the torrent of paint closing over my ears.

For good measure, I do it again. Dip, swipe, smooth.

I see my best friend talking with the girl in makeup and rolled skirts. I wave at her–she looks at me and looks down. The next day, she doesn’t find me at lunch, but she does find the floor.

Paint splashes onto the white tiles, falling, falling from my face, where it’s thicker in parts and thinner in others. I stain my knees in it as I trip over my own feet.

There I lay, sprawled across tile and paint and red.

And again. Wind burns my cheeks. I paint over them. Lies hurt my lips. I paint over them. Smiles crack the surface. I paint over them. Whenever something goes wrong, when something is ugly, when I am wrong, when I am ugly, I paint over it all. Dip, swipe. Dip, swipe.

Eventually, cracks stop forming when I smile and my laughter thickens. Molten glass instead of shards.

And it was better that way. The world saw only the mask I had embellished for them, and I was safe, shielded. The only times I ever saw it crack was when my parents hugged me tight after I’d cried off a layer.

I made sure it never happened again.

Yet–yet–lately I’ve been craving colour. Everything around me is spots of darkness, the dust clouding over my pupils. And yet everyone gets to see all the hues I put on myself, except for me. It’s not fair.

I spend my days whining, petulant, childlike. Afraid, too.

The top layer’s gotten a little flaky. Sometimes it’s like this after I win an award. No big deal. I close my fingers around the small kitchen knife and carefully shave off the loose bits. When I lift the blade, I squint at it. Two hazy centimetres deep of paint balance there. It is the closest I have ever come to screaming in the past few years.

I feel around my head. Something breaks off into my fist. Five centimetres.

No.

My hands run desperately over my lips, my forehead, my ears, my eyelids. Pieces start flying off. The room blurs into focus, my bedsheets dark blue, the peonies my mother set on my table a smudge of pale yellow. It’s no use; now I see the windowframe, then the light, then it’s tearing at my eyes again, and I’m trying, trying, holding my head, keeping the pieces together, grabbing for them as they crash spectacularly to the ground, but they fall through my fingers, slip down my arms, shatter into piles of multicoloured powder.

Then the sunset floods the room. I turn my face away, arms cradling my head, curling into myself and in the red, red light, the mess melts down again, coating over my fingers and snaking up my spine to my neck. Tightening.

My face is clear now, but I cannot move. The pressure holds me firmly in place, paint seeping into every pore, into my very veins. I am forced to look at myself in the mirror, skin dry and shrivelled, eyelids gone, hands locked. What a terrifying, terrible creature.

The paint spreads up to my ribs–I can feel it dripping down each bone. The cold air I haven’t gulped in since that one girl in the skirt and hoodie rushes in, smooths the paint over, seals it like a promise.

Slowly, slowly, it ices over my heart too. I cast a wild glance at the paints lining the base of my vanity mirror. The red is gone. Yellow, too. And blue. And purple. And green. And orange. White was gone a long time ago, I remember.

I cannot even hang my head in disgust at myself–which leaves one thing left to do.

I smile bitterly at my reflection and force my broken voice to admit it.

“I don’t know how to fix this.”