PERSONA

They say who you are

Is who you are when you're alone

But I don't feel anything.

I'm like a stone in rushing water,

Unmovable, slowly wearing down

And when I feel a chink in my armor

I pick it at, pulling it back

To reveal the layers hidden beneath,

So many layers, so many faces,

A paste-on smile for each day

And they pile up around me

But I keep on digging

Through the faces of a girl my parents want to see,

Through strange and foreign words my friends want to hear,

Thoughts tumbling onto the ground

Implanted by a society that screams for diversity

Yet dresses us all the same.

And the pile's so high I can't breathe

But I need to know the person hiding underneath it all

Because I don't know her anymore,

Just who she's suppossed to be.

Am I even there?

How can I know people

When I don't even know myself,

If I don't know if my thoughts are truly mine or someone else?

Why can I deal with other peoples' problems

But never my own?

How can I listen so well

But never hear myself over the sound of silence filling my head?

How do others feel so much,

Driven by the whim of emotion,

Yet my days pass in blurs of nothingness,

Dirty puddles in the cracks of broken asphalt.

You don't understand--

Who I think I am and who I am,

They're not the same

And I don't know which is which.

The girl buried under all these layers,

Too scared to live and too scared to die

Is not the same as the girl in the mirror.