faking-it

dear today, i spend all of you pretending i'm okay when i'm not, pretending i'm happy when i'm not, pretending about everything to everyone.

Sure, you can break a man. Bend his will, even, but be careful with the ones that break easily. Those are the ones you have to keep a close eye on. Those are the ones that play possum and hide in the shadows. Just waiting for their time to strike! That's when you're most vulnerable. When you're surrounded by friends.

At any other time it's better. You can do the things you feel you should; you're an expert at going through the motions. Your handshakes with strangers are firm and your gaze never wavers; you think of steel and diamonds when you stare. In monotone you repeat the legendary words of long-dead lovers to those you claim to love; you take them into bed with you, and you mimic the rhythmic motions you've read of in manuals. When protocol demands it you dutifully drop to your knees and pray to a god who no longer exists. But in this hour you must admit to yourself that this is not enough, that you are not good enough. And when you knock your fist against your chest you hear a hollow ringing echo, and all your thoughts are accompanied by the ticks of clockwork spinning behind your eyes, and everything you eat and drink has the aftertaste of rust.

Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself _ these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.

How many more of us are faking the facade? How many more of us are pretending to be something we're not? Even better, how many of us will have the courage to be ourselves regardless of what others think?

[P]ower, terrible, unprecedented power, and with it came the unavoidable choice that had faced every power-junkie since time began: to have the sheer gall to fake being something greater than a man, or cop-out on the millions who had poured a part of themselves into your image and be something less.

I found, increasingly, that I did not particularly care and I tried to fake a little kindness, a little sweetness, tried to mirror Luna back at herself, but that exhausted me after a week and I concluded that I was not meant for this sort of thing, friends, friendliness, no, I wasn't meant for it.

You shattered the remainder of my heart, yet you expect me to be okay with it day after day.

Her eyes were a bottomless ocean that I would give up air to explore.

Apparently having emotions equated to having a vagina.

He__ read in a textbook once a quote by the famous Captain Reynolds: I am not a brave man. But bravery, like most things, can be faked. And sometimes, in rare instances, it will lead to the real thing.

I often wonder, if those that smile the most, are the most saddest people in the world.

If there's something I'm not good at, it's usually because I just organically despise it. I can't help that. I'm fabulous at too many other things to waste my time faking it.

I fear that this is what long term relationships are all about, at base: full-time role-playing, memorized and inhabited.