The Stranger Wearing Your Skin

The room is bright, the coffee is hot, and you are laughing with everyone else. But then you hear it—the sound of your own voice rising in the group—and for a split second, it sounds like a stranger wearing your skin.

You freeze inside while the mask keeps smiling, terrified that if you stop performing, the whole thing will shatter. There was a man who sat at a table with his friends, eating and laughing, while his heart prepared for betrayal; he knew what it was to be physically present while spiritually dissociating, to be in the room but not of it.

The light does not hate the mask you wear to get through the morning. It sees the exhaustion behind the eyes that are crinkled in fake joy.

You are not a fraud for surviving the performance. You are a child of light who forgot, for an hour, that you don't have to prove you exist.

The laughter you hear is real enough, even if it feels borrowed. The silence underneath it is where the truth is waiting, not to judge you, but to remind you that you are already known.