And this, it is all your failings, all the ways you cannot hide:
Biting your lip to stop tears until that stops working, then using it to block frowns in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the former;
Blinking too fast to stop tears, and realizing, then, that you can allow your eyes to fill up with water, and so long as they don’t fall -
no one will notice.
Breathing desperately through your nose or not at all, to pretend the panic doesn’t exist, so it can consume you later, alone and vulnerable and afraid, rocking back and forth on various surfaces of floor. (Because you have convinced yourself it is your curse to bear alone, because bringing people pain for when they help you is not your idea of giving back to the world - (and the world owes you nothing, and if it did, it would not be this.)
Basking - or at least, accepting, compliments of others, in order to detach yourself from them more completely - (because the best way to hide is to make them believe you’ve gotten better, to make their worry dissipate and turn to some other better-deserving cause, for them not to realize this precarious state, because you are still only half way on the wagon, because without them you are far more likely to fall off - but these are not the things you want them to understand, you who are burden enough already, arguments aside, and know it.)
And because you keep secrets.
Theirs, and everyone else’s, and your own.
(Once, it was the weight of being all of their confidants that crushed you - now it is being your own.)
You can lie.
Not callously, not yet -
but you have gone beyond necessity,
have gone past only lies which could be considered kind.
And you have gone beyond feeling,
beyond the always soul-crushing guilt;
beyond the point where you have an intact fear of death;
beyond the point of being selfless,
of accepting help from others only when they genuinely want to,
and only when you desperately need it.
And what might terrify you,
(other than the discovery of this)
(other than them leaving)
is that they think you are still good.
still kind, still nice, still theirs
(and you are utterly petrified, of hurting them to save yourself.)
Because the nice ones flow under the radar, and the kind ones have the most power. And the difference, between you, and them, is that they do not know it, like you didn’t know it, and now you do - and here you are, using it to your own advantage. And by the time their belief no longer blinds them to your failings -
by then, it will be far too late.