Invisibility Cloak

I am most powerful at night. I am most vulnerable at night. The darkness is my blanket, but under it I rarely feel secure. It is a blanket that clothes me in nakedness, an invisibility cloak that exposes my innermost contortions  as I blend into the blackness around me. I am exposed to myself and no one else. I am invisible to all other people but my mind's eye, to which I am terribly, terribly visible. It sees pain inside of me that I had forgotten was stored away. It uses my body as a voodoo doll against myself. My blanket makes me uncomfortably drowsy. I am suspended in an aching, lethargic state, unable to close my eyes and submit to sleep.

I am swimming.

I am thrashing.

I make decisions for self-presevation?

My eyes, my chest, my body ache, and they pulse until I suddenly

drop off into a state of slumber.

When I wake up, I grasp desperately at the invisibility cloak around me. It appears different in the daylight, but I cannot afford to let it go. During the day, it keeps me safe. It holds me and protects me. It covers and conceals me. My contortions begin to recede, and I regain a normalcy of sorts. I am not vulnerable when the sun is shining, but I am weak.

It is funny how I have become an incarnation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The Page I Never Noticed

I think I skipped a page as I sat quietly in the corner of the library, flying through books, my nine-year-old self putting all of her effort that was not focused on reading toward adhering to the "Be Silent" rule. And I am convinced that this page I skipped was the worst oversight I never knew I had made.

It would have been nestled in between the Rules I Never Broke (I was never one for adventure novels) and the Thoughts I Locked Inside (I chose instead to live vicariously through the lives of the girls in teen and young adult books). My lack of spontaneity and ease of being intimidated into submission by authority granted me no opportunity to peruse the hidden crevasses of the library, peeking between my packed shelves of convention and anxiety. If only I had tumbled into a pile of the other kids' books, jumbling up my normal pattern, and one of them opened to the page I needed to read and my eyes would have absorbed the rich and exciting information that would have helped me so much in the years to come. Or perhaps all it would have taken was more careful reading of what already lay in my lap, a deeper and more thorough look at what was already in front of me, and I would have noticed that the page I was reading contained a breadth of potential knowledge that would serve me well in the future.

That page is probably still sitting there, neglected and yellowing, waiting for my nine-year-old self to lay a finger upon it. However, my nine-year-old self is ten years gone, and there is no going back as far as I can tell. I am left to wonder if I can ever regain what I lost through omission. Am I forever trapped between the lines?