Legitimate, Forbidden And Everything In Between

I never realized,

When I turned such a pro

At hiding things. 

Not that I've had any dearth of tutorials. 

I remember four years old me

Asking Mamma 

Why she wore dark glasses 

To hide her swollen eye.

Why she passed off a bruise as conjunctivitis. 

Why she narrated an amusing story 

About how she'd walked into a door 

To explain that welt over her forehead 

When the truth was far from funny. 

The first thing 

I've had occasion to hide 

Was an assessment paper 

The red marks my teacher

Had left liberally all over 

Were complemented perfectly 

By that 3 on 20 score 

Glaring back at me 

Like the ominous brand 

Of some medieval pagan cult. 

Perhaps I started showing signs 

Of the natural I was 

At this unscrupulous game of hide-and-seek 

When I had to hide 

My very first period stains 

That had very inconveniently arrived

When I was in school. 

Even as I bit my lip through the excruciating pain 

I had enough sense not to leave my seat throughout the day 

For every commercial, I'd seen 

Showed period blood as a pristine blue liquid 

Telling the world we actually bled blood that was red and smelled like rust 

Would be blasphemous;

Even immature 12-year old me was sure of this. 

But the real challenge I faced 

Was to hide a suicide note, 

Written in a frenzy of overwhelming rage, 

From the prying eyes of my mother. 

So I tucked it sneakily between the pages of a self-help book 

(Hope the irony is not wasted) 

All ready to scribble a shaky signature and say goodbye 

When I could no longer hold on to life 

By the skin of my teeth. 

So, it's been a decade and a half of rigorous practice 

Of hiding, of lying, of feigning composure. 

I've mastered every hack in the book, 

From passing off the scars on my wrist 

As a sloppy accident with a compass, 

To pretend that my panic attacks were just PMS-es, 

From not raising my hand when #metoo said I could, I should, 

To smiling that non-committal Schrondiger's smile. 

And I know I will pass this expertise on, 

To another generation of lost, pained vagrants, 

So that they can pretend they know their way.