April Unraveling

 

April Unraveling
You wore the ingénue’s smile like a second skin,
its gloss so perfect no one guessed the seams.
I watched you from the stalls, year after year,
and learned to loathe the actress at the core—
that bright, metallic thing beneath the gleam,
all surface tension, no interior. The mask slipped first in small, rehearsed betrayals:
a gesture sharper than the script allowed,
a laugh too brittle for the love scene’s vows.
Then circumstance began its slow dismantling—
lovers decamped, the rent unpaid, the crowd
thinning until the theater lights were dimming.
Superficiality, once your art,
became your only wardrobe; thread by thread
it frayed. I catalogued each pulled-apart
illusion, every fact I could not wed
to any single story I could chart. How many truths can one recorder hold?
Your sudden kindnesses, your casual lies,
the childhood wound you turned into gold,
the cruelty you practiced with bright eyes—
they will not cohere. I sift the evidence
like rain on slate, each drop a separate sense
of who you were, who you became, who lied.
The versions tangle, multiply, divide. Now April rain arrives, cold as a blade
against bare shoulders. No more costume, no
more footlights, no more audience to persuade.
I stand here naked, soaked, the play long closed,
and nothing left to reconcile but this:
the loathing and the pity both persist.
The facts keep falling. I have no disguise.