⭐ THE POLISHED SELF™ – Epilogue
A Diptych
Epilogue I: The Pastel Myth
(The last bow.)
Nothing ended loudly.
No doors, no final words,
just a soft rearranging of presence,
as if something stepped back
and forgot to return.
Since then, I’ve been careful,
polishing my sentences smooth,
rounding off the edges of silence,
so no one thinks to ask what changed.
I keep the foyer bright –
a curated warmth
of clean angles and predictable light.
It is a fragile, exhausting geometry,
to be a circle when the core is all splinter,
to keep the surface tension
from a sudden snap.
Tomorrow, I will stage a narrative takeover.
I’ll stand in the park –
a pastel myth, a spring nocturne –
providing the simple story
the world expects to hear.
The public does not ask
for the fractures or the labor;
they want the harmony of a beauty filter,
the sweetness of the mask.
So I will take my bow,
a character poised and perfect,
because a myth is easy to digest,
and being a person
is far too heavy a work
for the stage.
Epilogue II: The Splintered Core
(The truth after the lights go out.)
Nothing ended loudly.
No doors, no final words,
just a soft rearranging of presence,
as if something stepped back
and forgot to return.
Since then, I’ve been careful,
polishing my sentences smooth,
rounding off the edges of silence,
so no one thinks to ask what changed.
I keep the foyer bright –
a curated warmth
of clean angles and predictable light.
It is a fragile, exhausting geometry,
to be a circle when the core is all splinter,
to keep the surface tension
from a sudden snap.
But behind the doors
I’ve bolted shut,
the structure shifts
in slow, jagged plates.
Beneath the gloss,
the real work happens in the dark,
where the unpolished self
grinds against the grain,
quietly undoing
every careful shape.
And now the gloss
is thinning at the wrists.
A word slips out –
unpolished and sharp –
cutting through
the curated tea‑time hum.
I see you catch the light
in the crack:
the splintered core
finally showing its face,
refusing, at last,
to be a shape at all.