After three years, why am I still needing to make impressions? Behaviour alterations, manifesting myself to the person they want to see. Disregarding my character at the door, substituting it for something more - applicable, unnoticeable, unopinionated, mentally castrated because I can’t compete with that.

Introverted woven into the needlework of extroverts, camouflaging the thread, too frightened to be different, to be noticed, so you hide yourself within life’s tapestry. We are hung in different galleries, worlds apart, the north/south divide does it shrink with time? Does love conquer all? It seems such a foreign conquest, I lose myself on the battlefield of personality trying to evade fatality of character. But their numbers are too strong, the war is lasting too long, I can’t compete with that.


Eloquent hunters, fields and farms. Like the hare, the sense of inadequacy follows me down, but it’s through the rabbit hole where I lose control, fumbling for speech at the simplest conversation. My heart races, heat rising from my chest, pores palpitating so pools of sweat dampen my forehead, wishing I could retreat below, stay cool in the shadow, away from illicit bourgeois eyes that see through my proletariat alibi, praying she doesn’t cast me aside because I can’t compete with that.

This is the mental cross that I bare, does she really care? Our relationship is ours not theirs, I need to lay aside my prejudice of the class divide, because in truth the weight of this cross isn’t mine but shared, and it’s holding us back, directing us off the beaten track because love isn’t a competition, but a joint expedition. Alice and I conquering together, and I can compete with that. Forever.