They may take away my freedom, steal away my words, stifle my movement, and force me to adopt a veneer of passivity, but underneath my skin, from my flesh into my bones, an inner world is bursting at the seams. Paracosma. I’ve built it in little pieces since I was young.
At age seven, I was told my smile was too big. It faded in the real world, but in Paracosma it grew as a bright, beaming Venus flytrap that grinned wickedly before devouring pale human-faced flies it snatched out of the air.
At age fifteen, it grew louder and prouder with the addition of trumpeter swans the size of mammoths that breathed fire in their rage-filled screams when I was told my voice was too loud and sharp.
I became pleasant, soft, and quiet in my daily life. When the spark faded from my eyes, it didn’t go far; it merely sank deep out of view of judging eyes.
Finally, at age thirty, when I was told that somehow I had become less, that sunken light became a raging sun that beamed down on my inner world. It grew the dancing vines and talking flowers, igniting the spirit in the wild beasts. Vipers became dragons, water striders became river sprites, faeries controlled the elements, and the world grew thick with magic.
My girlhood came and went, and at times that inner ecosystem burst forth from my mouth in a hot white light filled with creatures both beautiful and terrifying. Only a few were privy to these expulsions. Sometimes they reveled there. Paracosma became their home too, if only for a little while.
All these years, and only now I wondered why I needed to bury my true nature. Because it wasn’t palatable? Because it wasn’t friendly, or what people wanted? Those people who came and went and didn’t care and didn’t think of me as they were too wrapped up in containing their own inner worlds.
I can feel the veneer cracking. One day soon, I won’t be able to contain it. It will drip out of the corners of my mouth, seep out of my eyes, my ears. I can feel it bubbling in my throat like hot magma on the brink of an eruption.
If I let go, would they hate me? If they did—would I even care?
To live well is to live true. To be real in all of its ugliness, beauty, venom, and joy. Burying the light inside—who does it benefit? No one but an ego, and that in itself is a shallow thing.