Beneath my Phantom Mask.

who am I. Beneath the mask I wear.

I am a Room I Rent....dwell...poised to flee...

no visitors invade my space - or discover the lies hidden beneath

tucked in-between a sketch of hidden minimalism - stripped to essence, hauntingly present.

the face I wear isn’t mine - lacquered calm, two eyeholes wide.

It speaks in muted tones, a borrowed silence...unrecognizable.

inside, I am but a sparse stranger. Alone and lost.

No clutter of longing, no cloak of shame. Just bone and breath,

a single thread of flame, hunting, chasing a fire which eludes me

my name is pared to silence. My thoughts - unfurnished rooms.

I walk like a diagram of motion, a sketch of someone who longs to bloom.

solitary, I stand in a vast, white void - no horizon, no walls, just infinite blankness.

I wear a smooth, expressionless mask - porcelain-like...two hollow eyeholes and no mouth.

the body is semi-transparent, revealing only skeletal outlines and a faint flicker of flame at the heart.

A minimalistic symbol: a thread, a diagram of motion, a scaffold, a single word absent from my sentence...Acceptance.

The mask casts a shadow - the shadow is a furnished room: cluttered with books, mirrors, velvet chairs, and tangled wires.

Above the figure, faint text hovers: “I am not hiding. I am reducing.

The mask is not deception - it’s architecture.

A scaffolding for the self , where the self is under reconstruction.

I am not hiding.

I am reducing. Searching for the part of me which I yearn to make my home

The place where acceptance dwells without compromise

Distilling the soul to its most honest geometry.

I long to create variations - shift the mood...the mask cracking...the flame growing into a tree...where the mask isn’t just concealment, but a ritual threshold between selves:

Between the Seen and the Shadow . I wear myself in layers -

one speaks in fluent gestures, smiles with practiced ease,

knows how to nod at the right moment.

But beneath,

there is a quieter architecture - a self not built for display, but for dreaming.

The mask is not falsehood. It is translation. A dialect of survival, a costume designed from expectation.

Yet sometimes, the inner self presses forward - a flicker in the eyehole, a tremor in the voice, a flame refusing to stay hidden.

I shift. Not from truth to lie, but from essence to interface...

From the soul’s raw geometry ...to the socially acceptable silhouette.

Who I am

is not who I appear to be -

but both are real.

One is the lie I tell the world.

The other is the truth I tell myself...

When the world is silent.

Two selves rendered in stark contradiction...the masked and the unmasked, the rigid and the fluid, the truth and the lie.