Lady Melancholy

I feel like how a ghost must feel today. Able to wander, able to look and see people; even able to contact some of them in some small way. But, I'm not allowed to touch them, and they're not allowed to touch me. The only smile I can offer is a fading memory, where the person I'm looking at must assume that I am smiling, and fill in the blanks of knowledge with what they want to see out of what was there.

Those who don't want to see me don't have to; and those who I don't want to see I can choose not to speak to, and they'll just go about their day as if they were talking to themselves.

I'm sitting at a table, the whole world in a vanity mirror faded by countless finger-touchings, secret caresses of the frozen cheeks of frozen faces in that second before they fade away. Sometimes, I feel them look right at me, with eyes that do not see.

Loneliness is when I have to ask if they do not see, or if they do not want to see, any more than I wish to see myself anymore than how I feel I must look.

How sad she must be, they think, feeling warmth in her cheeks but not in her hands, knowing she only reaches with one hand because she must lean on the other to know she still can know how her hands would feel on someone's face if only they knew.

Some of us are contented with only glimpses, she said, because this is all some of us will ever have, and we must learn to count our blessings.

Even though I cannot have, she said, I know. I know what it must be to have, she said, because I see those who have reflected here with the same mask I don just as surely.

I know what it is to change the world, she said--before I was here, everyone wore my face.