The Architect's Second Skin

The mask is not a lie, but scaffolding.

A necessary structure built of courteous wood,

painted in the neutral tones of "doing well,"

so that the soft, original shape of self

will not collapse beneath the daily weather.

You look at me and praise the smooth facade:

the smile that holds its corners in a bracket,

the voice that pitches perfectly between

too earnest and too easily dismissed.

This is the second skin, the social armor,

designed for deflection, not deceit.

But listen to the silence after words.

That is the seam where the disguise begins.

Beneath the varnish, in the hollow space,

lives the Architect, the frantic builder.

She keeps the blueprints of the true design:

the cavern where the grief is stored like gold,

the fractured angles of the rooms she broke,

and the one, cold window she refused to curtain.

This hidden self, which only wakes in darkness,

is a furious curator of old pain.

It knows the cost of every open door,

the price of being fully seen and known.

So, when the surface cracks—a hurried gesture,

a word that lands with an unnecessary weight—

it’s not the mask that failed, but the quick glimpse

of the fierce, unsheltered truth beneath.

The greatest trick is making the disguise

so solid, so habitually worn,

that even the Architect sometimes forgets

where the performance ends and the truth begins.

We wear the mirror behind our words,

reflecting what the other needs to see,

until the true self learns its perfect trick:

to stay hidden, safe, and fiercely whole.